Mickelsson's Ghosts (27 page)

“You're really not at all like that other one,” Donnie said, and with slow strokes patted his arm, approving.

It was because of the way she laughed, he'd realize later—and the way she looked at him—that he didn't quite notice what she'd said. He imagined her white, undersea-soft body in his bed and in some way understood that it might not be impossible to arrange.

Something bumped his feet and Mickelsson leaned over to look under the table and see what it was. A child was crawling past them, a fat, very dirty little girl. She smiled at him, then crawled on.

“Boy, talk about weirdos!” Tim said, and laughed. “I guess you didn't know him?”

“Know him?” Mickelsson asked. Because of the noise—the general talk and a sudden peal of laughter two tables away—he had to ask it again:
“Know him?”

“He was something,” Donnie said, “though I guess it's not something you should laugh abowt.” She laughed, then made her face drunkenly stern.

“I think they said he came owt from Sunny,” Tim said. “Course he didn't live here. Whole different situation, and he wasn't in philahsaphy either, I don't think. Psychology, was it?” He looked at Donnie. She didn't know.

Tim grinned and shrugged. “So you haven't seen the ghosts yet,” he said then. “I guess I'm naht real surprised, to tell the truth.” He raised his beer and swallowed a swig of it, then set it down and glanced around the room, wiping his mouth with his hand. “I guess the thing is, a town like this, crazy stories are abowt all there is to keep things lively. You wonder if there's any truth to any of it.”

Mickelsson nodded, agreeable, then raised his eyebrows and asked, “Any of what?” Tim apparently didn't catch it.

Donnie's foot—she'd taken off her shoe—came to Mickelsson's. At first he thought it was an accident, but the foot remained, and then after a moment her toes came up to touch his ankle. He glanced at her. One would swear the foot and the girlish, wet-mouthed face were unconnected. It was a pretty face, he began to think. Small, dimpled chin; light brown, myopic-looking eyes. The blond of her hair was unconvincing, but the dark lashes weren't exactly convincing either.

“What a weird idea,” she said, “living in a house with ghosts in it!” She laughed. Her foot came back to the toe of his shoe and pressed several times, rhythmical.

Mickelsson nodded, for some reason not sure even now what she was signalling. He knew, of course, but his mind kept going over it, rechecking. He found he couldn't remember at all what they'd been talking about. Someone bumped his shoulder, pushing past him toward the bar, and leaned over to shout in his ear,
“Excuse
me!” Mickelsson glanced up and nodded, then raised his glass and drank. The man moved on. His gray underpants showed above his trousers, outside his tucked-in shirt.

“Warren, that was his name,” Tim said.

Now Mickelsson remembered what they'd been saying. “You happen to recall his last name?”

“I think maybe that was his last name. I only saw him once or twice, myself. I remember people said he was very interested in the stories about your house.” He smiled.

“I guess that's not so strange, necessarily. Any particular stories?”

“Oh, well, you know,” Tim said. He shrugged again, then after a moment's thought took the stainless-steel ballpoint pen from his shirt pocket to play with it. “Man with a lot of questions, everybody said. That's all I know. I guess he thought he was being pretty canny, and I guess maybe people had him on a little. They'll do that, place like this. At the time they were still smahrting from the things that feller Skinner said—B. F. Skinner. He grew up here. Put all the local dirt in his autobiography—whorehouses all up and down Main Street, things like that. Fahr as I can say, it was mostly true, but you know how it is. Things look different when somebody writes 'em owt on paper.”

“So what happened to the man?” Mickelsson asked.

“Warren, you mean?” Tim asked. “Or Skinner?”

“I don't think we should talk about it,” Donnie said. She was rhythmically pressing on Mickelsson's shoe again, smiling and meeting his eyes.

Mickelsson looked thoughtfully from one to the other of them, trying to make out whether or not he too was being teased. He could no more tell than with old Pearson.

“I meant Warren,” Mickelsson said.

Tim shrugged, pursing his lips, then raised his beer and finished it.

“Really, I don't think we should
talk
about it,” ‘Donnie said. She smiled and glanced past her shoulder.

Tim made his hand into a gun and pretended to shoot himself in the head.

“He shot himself?” Mickelsson asked, leaning forward.

“Well, not exactly.”

“Someone else, you mean—?” He smiled, covering himself, in case it were all just a joke on him.

“That's about it. Of course nobody's saying there was a connection. But you know how people talk.” Tim gave his head a little jerk and smiled, apologetic. “I don't know how I got off on that. You're nothing like him, and the whole thing's just silly anyway. It happened up in Binghamton, the murder, I mean, and the man had never been down here more than three or four times.”

“More than
that,”
Donnie said.

“Well, six, maybe.”

“Now you're getting closer, anyway,” she said.

Mickelsson drained off his Scotch and held the glass up to look at it, still brooding on whether or not they were having him on. Maybe they thought if you told a man his house was haunted, then filled his head with vague, scary stories … He thought again, as he'd been thinking off and on for a week, of that brief, violent nightmare, if nightmare it was. Was it possible that they'd somehow planted that in his mind too? Strange sense of humor!

“Jeez,” Donnie said, looking at her little gold wristwatch, “I've gotta go! Prafessor, you wanna walk me home?”

“If you like,” Mickelsson said after a moment's hesitation, looking at Tim.

The boy was still playing with the pen, popping the point in and out.

“OK, Tim?” Donnie asked.

“Sure,” he said, and grinned. “Catch you tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow,” she said, and kissed the air in his direction.

As soon as they were outside the door, Mickelsson asked, “Maybe you'd like to come up to my place. Have a little nightcap?”

“Are you kidding?” she asked, and smiled, then took his hand.

He glanced at the Jeep, the troll-doll dark and still behind the windshield, as if hanged, and decided to walk.

She lived in an apartment on the fourth floor of an old brick building overlooking Main Street and the river. The first floor was Reddon's Drugs; the rest of the building consisted of apartments no doubt much like Donnie's, approached by the darkest stairway in the world, a long row of battered metal mailboxes on the first-floor entryway, then nothing but an occasional fly- and paint-specked bare bulb, a railing worn smooth by decades of use. On her door there was a white plastic rose. His growing erection pressed painfully against his trousers.

“Safe and sound,” he said when she'd unlocked the door.

“You wanna come in?” She looked up at him, her eyes in shadow.

He hesitated. “If you're not too busy,” he said.

She smiled. “This
is
my business. You mean you didn't know?” She looked at him with innocently widened, maybe mocking eyes, then pushed the door open and reached for his hand. He followed her in. She flicked the lightswitch by the door and the room leaped forward—a purple-carpeted livingroom furnished in K Mart and Goodwill, plastic imitation-lace curtains bright as barnacles on the windows, faded and water-stained tannish wallpaper with an obscure pattern of glossy places like stretch-marks on a woman's abdomen. The kitchen was to his left, separated from the livingroom by a rounded, dark oak arch. An old refrigerator clanked and hummed in tune with another sound, possibly an electric clock. There was no light in the kitchen except what fell from the livingroom, draping over part of an old sink and stove.

“Nice place,” he said.

She laughed.

He walked over to the window looking out at the street and drew back the curtain a little with the side of his hand. Her window looked down on the lighted iron bridge, the long dark curve of the Susquehanna River, and what remained of the huge, locked-stone depot. Directly below him lay the street. No one was out, though it was not all that late.

“Drink?” she asked.

“No thanks.” He was feeling distinctly uneasy now. It was obviously no place for a sober professor of philosophy, an ethicist at that. He could hardly believe it was happening. Looking out at the bridge, the asphalt-patched street, he thought about disease, stories of prostitutes and murder. His erection was increasingly painful, and a kind of trembling had come over him. The air was hot and muggy. He was beginning to sweat.

A light went on behind him; she'd opened the refrigerator door. She stood for a long time looking in, then closed the door and came to him, carrying a beer. “You mind opening this for me?”

He accepted the bottle from her—it had a twist-off cap—and opened it. “I have a feeling you cost a lot,” he said.

She shook her head. “Depressed area.” She winked, then raised the bottle to her lips.

“Mind if I smoke?” he asked.

“Anything you like.” She glanced at him, coy. “But no hitting, and nothing really really yuk.”

“I'm not into yuk,” he said. “Actually, I'm pretty puritanical.” He thought a moment, studying a bruise on her shoulder, then said, “Listen, I really have to ask this. How much?”

With one hand she unbuttoned the top of her dress and—almost shyly, he thought—exposed one blue-white breast. She studied it, thoughtful, and after a moment, without lifting her head, raised her eyes to him. “Not too expensive,” she said. Her smile was calculated, but not quite hard, despite the fake eyelashes—not quite professional (though Mickelsson was admittedly no judge). Her youth was increasingly disconcerting. In fact he was suddenly filled with dread, wondering what his solicitous friend Tim had gotten him into. When he put his arms around her, drawing her close, his trembling became violent. On her forehead there were droplets of sweat.

In the middle of the night Mickelsson awakened alone in a strange, musty bed, roused by a sound of angry shouts not far away, somewhere below and outside. He sat up, trying to minimize the creak of bedsprings and figure out where he was. Even the shouting outside was not enough to block from his mind the return, all in a rush, of images of her body—breasts, buttocks, mouth—and his own, shuddering and heaving, driving into her. He was once again semi-erect. “Asshole!” someone yelled not far away. There was a sound of breaking glass, then several shouts at once.

The livingroom door was part way open, letting in enough light that he could be certain the girl had gotten up and left him, and that his clothes were still on the chair at the foot of the bed, apparently untouched. As quietly as possible he got up out of bed and went to his trousers. The wallet was still in the right rear pocket, and his money, he found when he looked, was still inside. Now he wasn't so sure his clothes hadn't been touched—something was wrong—and he checked his valuables again. All there. He drew on his undershorts and trousers, put his arms through the sleeves of his shirt, and, disguising his erection as well as he could, started for the livingroom.

“You OK?” she called, an instant before he emerged.

She was sitting in the overstuffed armchair by the window, reading. As if self-consciously, she took off her glasses.

“What's all the noise?” he asked. Flasher-lights jarred the darkness beyond the window. He moved closer to her to look out.

“Saturday night fights,” she said. She smiled. “I guess it's hahrd to imagine that kind of thing where you come from.”

He bent toward the window. “What do you mean? Boxing?” He knew it wasn't that.

Out on the lighted street there were thirty or forty young men, a few young women, and several policemen. They seemed to be doing nothing, just standing there shouting.

“They do that all the time,” she said. “Haht nights, they come down owt of the mowntains in their pickup trucks and drink beer till they're all sweaty and mean, and then they stahrt hitting. It's no hahrm, really. You could go owt there and walk right through them, they'd never touch you.”

“What a crazy place to live,” Mickelsson mused aloud.

One of the policemen was trying to persuade one of the young men to get into a police car. The young man stood with his arms folded, shaking his head. He was far too big to push.

“You know, you shouldn't have come here,” the girl said. “You should go back wherever you were, while you've still gaht your looks.”

When he glanced down at her, she was smiling. Delicately, with two fingers, the pinkie raised as from a tea-cup, she unzipped his fly.

“I thought you said I could walk right through them and they'd never touch me.”

“They
wouldn't. At least I
think
they wouldn't.” She lowered her gaze to her magazine, maybe taking note of what page she was on. One could have sworn she actually did not know she was reaching in, closing her hand on his stiffened penis. His heartbeat quickened.

“Who would?” he asked.

“How would
I
know? Do I look like a newspaper? All I know is it's not good, you being here.”

“In this apartment?”

“No, that pahrt's all right.” She smiled again. She had a chipped, blackened dogtooth, just noticeable when she forgot and smiled too widely. “What's not good is when you leave and go back to that—house.”

“Is it the house I should be afraid of?”

It was the craziest conversation he'd ever been party to. His mind seemed wonderfully clear, but split in two.