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

the time—and tended to believe now—that he’d given his teacher no provocation. In any case she’d lied, or tried to, saying he’d fallen while running—wicked child—in the classroom. Much as all the children feared her, someone had told on her, and at last, bitterly weeping, blaming Mickelsson, Miss Minton had admitted what she’d done. When he’d complained, theatrically crying, to his parents, faking more pain inside the cast than he felt, they’d insisted that he must have done something very wrong—“There’s two sides to every story,” his father said, not ungently but with finality—and the principal had pretended to hold the same opinion. (She’d been as kind as she was able to be. The principal had suggested, in subtle ways, that if he endured through this year he would next year have Mrs. Wheat, who would make up for it all—which in fact had proved true.)

Miss Minton would slap your hand with the ruler—so hard that the fingers would sting for minutes—if you said “Hell-o-copter” instead of “helio-co-peter.” She would also hit you with the ruler if you said “stuff,” as in “books ’n’ stuff”—“except when you’re talking about Thanksgiving,” she said. (“That’s not ‘stuff,’ that’s stuffing,” Mickelsson had said scornfully. She’d hit him with the ruler.) She also hit you for reading “David Cooperfield,” as she called it. Why it was wrong to read David Copperfield she did not explain; perhaps because he read it through arithmetic class—but he loved arithmetic and had finished and handed in all the book’s exercises weeks ago. Pretty clearly her madness had in it, among other things, something twistedly sexual. When she’d finally admitted slamming the desktop on his forearms, she explained to the principal that she’d done it because he was “playing with himself.” No one questioned this, though the physical contortions the claim suggested were extreme—as extreme as his small-boy prudery and shyness.

Miss Minton was not pretty. She was thin as a rail from the collarbone up and from the knees down, and a blimp between. She had such warts as would not be tolerated in the work of a painter who claimed to be realistic, and from half the warts, as from the rest of her body, came soft moss. Her hair was black, her face chalky white except for artificial colors here and there. She was unpleasant in every way, and when later that same year she had died of a brain tumor, Mickelsson had not been as sorry or forgiving as he’d pretended.

And so, locked in the coatroom that afternoon, Mickelsson, still with his arm in a cast, had begun to look through the art supplies—mainly white paste and construction paper, brushes and dried-up tempera—then look (not for the purpose of stealing) through the other children’s coats. Eventually, in the broomcloset, he’d found Miss Minton’s coat, boots, green felt hat, umbrella, and purse. In the purse he found her make-up. When Miss Minton opened the coatroom door at four o’clock—he had never fully intended this to happen—she met a creature wearing her own coat, hat, and boots, a face painted to look as if it had horribly shattered, splashing blood. That was not the worst. In the creature’s right arm, Miss Minton’s umbrella was raised like an axe. It came down on her. She would remember nothing more for several hours.

Now all the children began to scream. He chased them with the umbrella, screaming back at them, terrified, trying to make them stop. It seemed the whole world was in reeling, finny commotion, flopping end over end. And then the black janitor, Mr. Pierce, was holding him in his arms, talking to him quietly and squeezing the air out of him. Miss Minton, laid out flatlings with her face turned toward him, over by the coatroom door, was talking. The words dribbling out between her parted lips made no sense.

No one had knocked yet at Mickelsson’s door. He decided to sit down in the front room with a book, to make doubly sure he didn’t miss them when they came. The clean lines and colors of the candy and apples weighed on his spirit. Still no knock, no laughter in the yard. He was too far out in the sticks, perhaps. No one even crept up to soap his windows. Was it possible that Halloween was last week? Next week? In the end he put the candy away in plastic bags in his refrigerator. For days after that, he ate apples from the bowl in his livingroom or from his pockets.

He’d been driving to the university, during this period, no more often than he had to, and avoiding people, as well as possible, when he was there. Occasionally he broke this pattern, always to his later grief. Once, travelling down a hallway he seldom used, and glancing in through an open office door, he saw someone he recognized, a young man he’d met at a party somewhere and had enjoyed talking to—they’d talked about football. He glanced at the name on the door—Levinson—then waved and called in, “Hi there! How’s it going?”

The young man turned his head, looking startled, then pleased to see him. “Hi!” he said. “Terrible!” He laughed, but the left side of his lip jerked up, forming a sneer not meant for Mickelsson but for the world. He was wearing one of those Greek off-white sweaters—more off-white just now than it ought to be, slightly ragged at the cuffs and too short.

“What’s wrong?” Mickelsson asked seriously, at once genuinely concerned and sorry that he’d stopped.

“Ahgh, nothing,” Levinson said, regretting that he hadn’t answered, Fine, just fine! He raised a hand to his curly, dark hair, not to touch it but to place the pencil he’d been writing with up behind his ear, like a grocery clerk. “I’m getting killed, these gas prices. I’ve been here eleven years as an associate professor, and all I’m making is twenty-one.” Again his lip lifted in the involuntary sneer. “My son’s in Boston, with his mother. It was a