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

ages of fifteen and twenty-five die by accidents, suicide, or homicide). Yet he couldn’t help but worry—indeed, Peter Mickelsson was worried sick—about the long-range effects of the boy’s decision to go underground. Not the danger that he might be caught for something, and imprisoned, or shot; these things, though he thought of them, had not yet impressed themselves on Mickelsson as real possibilities. He worried that Mark’s heart, like his own—but far nobler than his own—might be broken.

He shook his head, raising his hand to his chin, touching the stubble of whiskers. Perhaps things were not as dark as he imagined. What if it was the influence of some young woman that had made Mark disappear? Some beautiful, flashing-eyed, nutty radical. Let it be that, he thought. He almost came to believe it; it made the rest—the extremity of disappearing—make sense. Yet his gloom remained, deep and sodden. A flock of birds floated high over the trees on the mountain above him, drifting like specks of ash.

There was, sometime during this period, a queer piece of news in the Binghamton paper. Early in the morning someone had discovered, less than thirty miles from where Mickelsson lived, three perfect circles, each a hundred yards wide exactly, cut into the forest just off Route 17. Within the circles, trees, wildlife—whatever had been there, apparently—had been ground to bits. Federal investigators called in to study the strange phenomenon, the article said, had ruled out wind damage, flood, and human vandalism. Asked if they thought the circles had been made by UFOs, the investigators said, according to the paper, that that seemed at present the only available explanation. Mickelsson reread the sentence. That was, sure enough, what it said. The article mentioned that similar circles had been found in the same area two years earlier. Mickelsson pulled at his mouth with two fingers and read the whole thing again, expecting that this time he would surely find it was a joke of some kind; but it was apparently not a joke, at least in the mind of the newspaper people. Strange business!

The following day when he went in to teach, Mickelsson waited for someone to mention the peculiar article—more and more peculiar, as he thought about it: though they’d treated the story as front-page news, the news people hadn’t even bothered to print a picture. Surely in a case as bizarre as this, a couple of aerial photographs … To his surprise, no one said a word about the article until Mickelsson himself brought it up; and even then, as it seemed to him, they showed only the feeblest interest. Fred Rogers, the historian, when Mickelsson met him just outside the mailroom, smiled as if bravely withstanding life’s woe, sadly amused by Mickelsson’s concern. “We get a lot of that,” he said. “Binghamton’s one of the hot spots, apparently. I guess you’re familiar with the Port Crane Center for the Study of UFOs?” He flipped tragically through his envelopes, sorting as he spoke.

“You’re kidding,” Mickelsson said.

Rogers glanced at him for an instant, then back at his mail. “No,” he said, as if seeing no reason anyone should think he might ever be anything but serious. “You haven’t seen the trucks? I imagine you’ll see one, sooner or later, tooling down the highway. Port Crane’s not far from here, up on Route 88. They’re beautiful things, those trucks—enough to make you want to study UFOs yourself. Big vans, very official-looking. Sign on the door, siren, red flashers, radar dish on top, computers inside …” Suddenly, woefully, Rogers laughed. “Peter, you should see your face,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” Mickelsson said, and made an effort to look sober and sensible. “I guess it never—”

“Yes,” Rogers said, glancing down the hallway, preparing to move on, “it’s curious, all this. Well, there are lots of strange things in this old world. ‘Falls,’ for instance. That’s the one I like—frogs falling out of the sky, or blood, or fish … stones. … Most people say it’s hogwash, but nobody says that after they’ve seen one.”

Mickelsson lifted an eyebrow, not quite willing to ask the question.

“Oh, sure,” Rogers said, shaking his head and patting his pile of mail as if the proof were right there. “I saw the fall of little stones out in Chico, California—maybe you read about it; it made a lot of the papers. I was there the second day. ‘Right out of a clear blue sky,’ as the saying goes. It was most peculiar, believe me. Made you blink your eyes a bit. There were scientists there, state police, newspaper reporters. We just stood there with our hands folded and looked. Even in Chico nobody believed it except the people who were right there and saw it. Poured down out of the sky as if there were somebody up there with a dump-truck, except not that fast and not that steady, sometimes nothing for a while, then one or two stones, then bucketfuls. The way they hit the ground they seemed electrically charged or something—blurry, as if with heatwaves. Very odd, but then when they’d settled they just lay there, commonest stones in the world. People make up theories, but they never explain anything. Waterspouts, for instance. But nobody tells you how the stones pulled out of the ocean by waterspouts get carried along in the sky to a place as far inland as Chico, or how come the stones are invariably the local kind, different from even the stones you’d find forty miles away.” Rogers smiled and shook his head, raising one hand to discourage protest. “I know. I know. You’d be surprised, though, how many thoroughly studied cases there are of these mysterious falls—though I must say, in these matters ‘study’ seems a little irrelevant. I’ll tell you my favorite one: a fall in St. Louis—1967, I think. Five and a half tons of cookies in unmarked plastic bags.” He laughed, and Mickelsson risked laughing with him. “Thorough investigation,” Rogers said, “local police, U.S. government,