Mickelsson's Ghosts (12 page)

An image of old Pearson from higher on the mountain floated into his mind. For a moment, just before he dropped off to sleep, he imagined he heard someone walking, slowly, as if puzzled, from room to room downstairs in the dark. An unpleasant sensation came over him, as if he were suddenly someone else, full of physical discomforts and anger. When he concentrated, the sounds and the strange sensation stopped together; or rather, the whole thing evaporated, like meaning from a word in a dream.

5

Though he was eager to get down to fixing the house, he was prevented from it, temporarily, by the fall semester's starting up—not to mention lack of funds. His situation was now so hopeless that he'd for the moment given up entering his checks. Bouncing was more or less inevitable. God damn the theater, he thought again and again, meaning his wife's absurd “investments“—most of them gifts, it had turned out, to down-and-out actors too childish to make sensible use of them. But the fault had not been hers alone. It was Mickelsson himself who'd bought the big house in Providence, the thousands of books, the Peugeot. He would accept the necessity of writing whining letters, making wild promises, praying that something would turn up, though nothing would.

“How can it be that bad?” Tom Garret asked once in the mailroom, his smile pleasantly baffled. Garret had ten kids, and nowhere near Mickelsson's salary. To his credit, he made no pretense of feeling pity. “You must make at least twelve hundred a month after taxes. And all those textbooks. Don't they bring something in?”

“We lived high,” Mickelsson said, giving Garret one of his gloomy, significant looks. The look suggested yachts, gambling casinos.

Stubbornly Garret smiled on, like ole massa making light of his slaves' complaints. He swept his hands out to the sides, palms up. He smiled harder, in fact, his round cheeks bunching up, and said with maddening Southern gentility, “Everybody's got debts. But with the money you make … When's the last time you sat down and really tried to figure it all out?”

“Tom,” Mickelsson said, half turning away, controlling anger, “believe me, you've got no idea.”

“If I were you,” Garret said, “I'd get a graduate assistant, and I'd have him or her lay everything out in black and red. …”

Whatever more he said, Mickelsson did not hear; he'd left the mail-room.

It was true, of course, that Mickelsson was not very clear on where he stood. Adding up his bills—those he could find (he had them stuffed everywhere, in part of his bookcase, all over his desk, in brown manila envelopes under his desk)—then looking at the month's statement from the bank, he would get chest-pains, and his head would cloud with confusion. He should certainly work out some plan, some schedule; but one could see at a glance that it was hopeless. For years his accounts had been neat and exact. Then Ellen had taken over. The thought of now unsnarling it filled him with anger and despair: he simply couldn't do it. Sometimes when it seemed to him that he hadn't written a check in weeks, so that there must be a fair amount in the bank, he would write a great swatch of them and mail them away with a prayer. Mostly he'd just send a thousand to Ellen and, for the rest, would let Nature take its course; that is, he would wait for the sheriff. He'd known in advance all Garret had to tell him, and something more, that Garret had not dared imply: that in a way he was purposely burying himself in debt and financial confusion. It was part of his general anger at the world, or in Heidegger's special sense
die Welt
—the Establishment, conventional values and expectations. Whether or not he approved of the feeling, he felt like Gulliver among the Lilliputians. He had deigned to behave like an ordinary man, buying what the TV told him to buy, giving what his wife in her position as lady-in-the-world demanded, and now here he was, a giant entangled in strings. Rather than snip all those strings one by one, with the patience of an ant, he would die and rot on the hill where he was tied, let his sweet death-stench drive the Lilliputians from their island.

Rhetoric. It was his joy and salvation, not that it paid the bills. It was his cynosure in the rift between
Welt
and
Erde,
the inviolable domain of the mad superman, the L-13 balance between words and things. It was indeed a kind of madness, of course. If one posed the problem in George Steiner's way (recalling Thomas Mann's), as one between a classicism harmonically “housed” in language and a modernism in which the particular no longer chimes within an overarching universe, Mickelsson's rhetoric was his noisy pox on both the many-mansioned house and the sticks-and-stones exile shanty. As Luther had hated the long dark shadow of the Pope, and as Nietzsche had hated Luther, Mickelsson hated everything, everybody, every remotest possibility. He hated works, he hated grace, he hated the retreat to love in all its permutations, from Eleanor of Aquitaine's Court of Love to the darkling plain of Matthew Arnold. He therefore despised his bills, was made angry and frightened by the very idea of debt. He would not think about it.

Not only was there, in addition to all his former burdens, the $224 a month that must go to house payments, and another $20 for fire insurance—required by the bank (fire was the only insurance he carried)—he'd also had to lay out $700, plus insurance, registration, and licensing, for a misshapen, cranky old Jeep. He'd met Tim Booker on the street, down by the Acme Market, on a bright September morning when the air had a smell of winter in it, and Tim had said, grinning, delighted to see him, “Hay, you geared up for snow, Prafessor?”

Mickelsson had laughed sociably. “I guess winter's right around the corner.” The smell in the air had been the only evidence of it. Not a leaf had turned, and nights were often so warm he had to sleep with the windows open.

“Up there where you are,” Tim said, “they'll be drifts ten foot deep, and that's if the winter's a light one!” He made it sound like praise, as if Mickelsson had done something masterful in choosing such a troublesome place to get to. “I hope you've gaht something to plow your driveway owt!”

Mickelsson had looked at him thoughtfully, half smiling because Tim was infectiously smiling; but he was feeling anxious. Heaven knew he couldn't afford a truck and snowplow! What were they these days—five, six thousand dollars used? For a moment the very thought of having to lie to the bank for more money made it hard for him to breathe. (He thought of Finney, Rifkin, his wife and children. He, a man with his name in
Who's Who,
walked around even now in shoes with holes in them; all his collars and cuffs were frayed. Sometimes students, usually young women, would point it out to him and laugh.) He said, though in fact the idea had only now occurred to him, “I've been thinking of trading the Chevy for a Jeep, if I can find one that's not too expensive.” He glanced at Tim.

“Might be a good idea,” Tim said. “In fact I might know of one, if you're interested.” He shook his head and laughed. “It's naht much, but I'm pretty sure the feller'd sell 'er cheap. Fahrmer I know down in South Gibson, cousin of my wife's. It's only gaht forty thousand miles on it—but tell the truth they're mostly in granny-gear, pulling loaded stone-boats over new-plowed ground.” He laughed again.

“You think it would run? I'd hate to lay out—”

“Oh, I'm pretty sure it would
run
OK. He's taken pretty good care of it, if you don't mind a wired-up tailgate and a couple of windows that won't roll down. You know these fahrmers.” Again he laughed, clapping his hands as if he'd told an extremely funny joke. Though the laugh seemed as open and innocent as a boy's, Mickelsson, still half smiling, eyed him narrowly.

After an instant Mickelsson asked, “You're sure it's not haunted or anything?”

Abruptly, each for his own reasons, both of them laughed, and Tim reached out to put his hand on Mickelsson's upper arm, the gesture of an athlete, winner to loser. “Isn't that something?” he said. “You hear the story about the feller who stayed there all night and it turned his
hair
white?”

“Not me,” Mickelsson said. “Nobody tells me anything.” But he felt good now, relieved and cleansed, the whole thing behind them.

And so he'd driven down, following Tim's directions, to the farm outside South Gibson, where Tim's wife's cousin Charles Lepatofsky had the Jeep. Lepatofsky was a smiling, chatty man, fat and short, with oversized nose and hands, thick curly hair peeking out at his collar and matted on his arms, almost hiding his tattoos. He had his four- or five-year-old daughter with him, a silent, shyly smiling red-head, something wrong about her eyes—maybe just a dreamer. Lepatofsky automatically put her up on his shoulders, not asking if she wanted him to, hardly even glancing at the child in fact. Automatically she put her hands around his forehead, carefully not covering his eyes, and they started across the neatly mowed back yard toward the weeds beyond. Mickelsson walked with them through brittle, high grass and ragweed down a lane thick with raspberry and elderberry bushes, past a shaggy pony and two brown horses, part of an old tractor and an upside-down truck, up a hill to a sagging, paintless barn with its door wedged shut by a locust post. Without taking his daughter from his shoulders, the man tugged hard at the post, veins standing out on his forehead and wrists.

“Are you your daddy's pal?” Mickelsson asked, holding one finger to the girl's face, close to the chin. She did not look at him.

“Lily don't talk much,” Lepatofsky said.

Now he had the brace-post unwedged. After Lepatofsky got the door open, Mickelsson cautiously stepped in and then stood—shocked, to say the least—simply looking.

“There she be,” Lepatofsky said.

“Yes, that's right,” Mickelsson said, slowly nodding.

From the looks of it, the Jeep hadn't been driven in years. It was moored by cobwebs heavy as ropes and weighed down by mounds of pigeon droppings, so mud-stained and weed-specked it looked as if it had been sunk in some marsh and, long afterward, salvaged. One back tire was flat, and one side panel had been banged in in three places, as if a crazed ram had come after it.

“Ain't much, is it,” the man said, and smiled, then winked. “But you gotta admit the price is right.” He wore his sleeves rolled up, a crushed pack of cigarettes under one of them, on both arms large tattoos.

“You think it still runs?” Mickelsson asked. He couldn't tell whether he was delighted by the thing or horrified. It would be a shocker, down on the university parking lot, if he could get it that far. (He imagined Jessica Stark or some handsome young-lady graduate student climbing into it, heading, in Mickelsson's company, to some party.) On the other hand—perhaps because of its oversized tires, or because it stood all alone in the rotting, empty barn, wide bars of dusty light draped over it—it looked like the largest, most hard-worked, somehow most
serious
Jeep he'd ever seen. It was a 1973 Wagoneer, Lepatofsky told him. A snowplow came with it (he had it in the “grodge”) and it also came equipped—Lepatofsky said it as if he thought it very special—with a brand-new chrome-covered trailer hitch. “Tell you what we'll do,” Lepatofsky said. “Lily and me will pump up the tire and we'll drive you owt for a ride.” He winked at his daughter. For the first time, the little girl looked thoughtfully at the professor.

While Mickelsson waited, his hand on his pipe, moving slowly around the Jeep, studying the rust and the blistered whitish-yellow paint, the plastic, red-haired troll-doll hanging from the rear-view, mirror (the Jeep also had side mirrors, one of them broken), Lepatofsky, with the child still on his shoulders, went back to the house for an old tire-pump. It took him half an hour, sweating like a horse, the girl pressing her palms against her knees beside him, to get the tire up high enough to run on. At last, leaning the pump in the doorway and taking his daughter's hand, he said, “OK, hop in!” When he'd gotten into the driver's seat and settled Lily in his lap, he looked over at Mickelsson, waiting. Mickelsson looked at the dirt on his own seat, a quarter-inch thick, thought of wiping it off with his handkerchief, then sighed, grimaced, and, taking the pipe from his mouth for a moment, climbed in. Perhaps for Mickelsson's benefit, Lily reached up and tapped the troll-doll, making it swing. She smiled to herself.

The motor roared to life at the second turn of the ignition key—it had been driven more recently than Mickelsson had thought, apparently—and Lepatofsky, twisting around to look out the back window, backed the Jeep, coughing and bucking, out of the barn. “It needs to warm up,” he said, and winked. The engine did settle down, after a minute, though not to the point of hitting on all of its cylinders. He drove straight down to a shallow, reedy swamp, shifted to low-low and four-wheel drive, and started through it. Water oozed up onto Mickelsson's shoes, making him lift his feet and glance at Lepatofsky. The daughter smiled. Mickelsson sat rigid and unbalanced, hanging on with both hands, feeling slightly injured by the child's amusement and thinking how it would feel to have to walk, with the child smiling at him from Lepatofsky's shoulders, through all that muck to dry land. Just outside his window a ratlike thing—a muskrat or small beaver—paddled away in alarm, its eyes rolled back.

To Mickelsson's amazement, the Jeep inched on through the water and reeds and at last climbed to solid ground. Lepatofsky shifted out of low-low and grinned.

“Jesus,” Mickelsson said, and slowly lowered his feet.

“You telling me,” Lepatofsky said, and laughed with relief, winking at his daughter. The whole side of his face moved, as if the wink were a tic.

For all his talk about the price being right, he hadn't yet mentioned one. Now, when Mickelsson asked him about it, he said, “Seven hundred, firm.”

“I see,” Mickelsson said. Then, after a moment, “That's fair, I guess.” He studied his pipe. “I'd been thinking of trying a used-car lot, maybe, where I could trade in the Chevy. …”