Mickelsson's Ghosts (49 page)

Mickelsson glanced at Jessica, who smiled, reserved.
Damn stiff-necked bitch,
he thought. In her shadow, Mabel Garret, ancient and elfin in her drab black dress, was looking at Mickelsson with an expression so clouded and unfriendly that a shiver ran up his back. He glanced at Garret. “I guess I don't know what you mean.”

“You old
yenta,”
Garret said, smiling on and clamping a hand on his arm. Then he too saw his wife's expression, and his smile went as blank as his glasses. Michael Nugent's face emerged from among the others, staring hard at Mickelsson, as if harboring some grudge. His face was so white it looked as if he'd powdered it. Belatedly, Mickelsson raised his hand to wave, but Nugent had disappeared, fading like a fugitive back into the press.

“Well,” Jessica began, unaware of whatever it was that was going on with the Garrets—but that moment Tillson broke in on them. He had his short, big-bosomed wife in tow, her face triangular, sad-eyed, long-suffering, at the moment bravely smiling. Tillson firmly gripped Mickelsson's hand, his silver-bearded head thrown forward, his grin and eyebrows twitching. “Wonderful concert!” he piped, shaking Mickelsson's hand as if Mickelsson were responsible. Then, as if to cover his exaggerated friendliness toward Mickelsson, he reached in past him to shake Phil Bryant's hand. “Wonderful concert!” he cried, and gave his head a sharp sideways snap. Bryant smiled vaguely. “Interesting poem, that last,” he said, but Tillson didn't hear, swinging his face around toward Jessica and crying, “Shall we try to catch the Swissons for a drink?”

“I don't know,” Jessica said. She gave Mickelsson a look, then turned quickly back to Tillson: “Yes, let's!”

Mabel Garret said, with her usual madwoman abruptness, “We have to go home. Tom can meet you if he wants to.” She gave a quick, shy smile. “All those kids, you know.”

“Oh!” Mrs. Tillson said—the first thing she'd said to any of them—“I'm so sorry!” She pressed her hand to her heart. “I'd hoped—” Tillson leaned in, nodding urgent agreement.

Mabel ignored them, staring hard at Mickelsson. “Peter,” she said, “don't go home tonight. Stay with someone in town.”

“What?” Jessica said.

Mickelsson waited. Something had happened inside his ears; perhaps he was hearing the roar of his own blood.

“I have this feeling,” Mabel said.

“What do you mean?” He grinned but raised his fist to his chest, pressing in, having a little difficulty with his breathing.

“I don't know.” She suddenly laughed and raised her hand to her eyes.

Tom Garret leaned into the group to look up at Mickelsson. “Her hunches are sometimes uncanny, Pete.”

When Mickelsson looked back at Mabel, she was already turning, fixing the shoulder-strap of her large, lunky purse and moving off quickly, fleeing her friends' attention.

“Are you all right, Peter?” Jessica asked.

“I just think I'll get a drink of water,” he said.

Two hours later, after food, martinis, and several cups of coffee at the Firehouse Five—the Swissons saying no more than two words to anybody there, even Edie Bryant—and after dropping off Jessica with a kiss on the cheek (“Thanks, Peter!” “No, no, thank
you,”
both of them feeling, it seemed to him, like traitors, though he couldn't make out even now where it was that the evening had gone awry)—Mickelsson, driving up the winding mountain road, just escaped being slammed into a ditch by a dark, expensive-looking car. For all the speed with which the car came at him—barrelling straight down the middle of the road, headlights undimmed, blindingly lighting up the snowfilled night—for one violent, ephemeral instant as the two cars slid crazily around each other, nearly overturning, Mickelsson saw in the beams of his headlights the face of the driver who'd nearly killed him. Fists clenched at the top of the steeringwheel, her ashen face thrown forward toward the windshield, almost striking it, wide-eyed and white in her black overcoat, sat the large, pleasant woman who'd sold him his house, “the doc.”

He stopped the Jeep as soon as he was able; but whatever was at her heels gave the doctor no quarter: her taillights shot away down the mountain road, around sharp, falling corners, under overhanging limbs, then plunged between stone banks and trees and was suddenly out of sight.

5

He was too upset to sleep. Every time he closed his eyes he saw again those sudden, blinding lights in the curtain of white flakes, slicing out of nowhere, less like a car than like a speeding UFO, and he felt again that sickening yaw of weightlessness as the Jeep snowplowed sideways, climbing—leaping like a wolf—up the wall of the high, soft snowbank and stones underneath, teetering, tilting far over as if to topple, then righting itself. The other car too had gone sideways up onto the snowbank, rolling part way over onto the door of the driver's side, sending out an arc of white glitter like spray from a motorboat, roaring like a train as the metal caved in, the headlights aiming down, his own aiming straight, from slightly above, at her windshield. It felt to Mickelsson like the whole spin-out of his life reduced to one timeless instant—his financial ruin, his sick infatuations, his self-destructive smoking and drinking, his professional collapse. …

He stripped to his underwear to lift weights for a while. That often helped, at times like these. Partly it helped his ego; in more concentrated fashion than his work on the house, weight-lifting kept the middle-aged thickness of trunk mostly muscle, burning away the gin fat; kept his arms and thighs toned up, free of undue flab or, worse, plain old-folks'-home weakness. And then too, there was the drug effect, better than any gin or marijuana in the world: sucking in air, swallowing great gulps right to the bottom of the abdomen, bending and, with a loud cry of
hap,
lifting, holding, and after a quick shift of balance, throwing the press. … The pain came quickly, and then almost as soon, the human morphine that shut it off. Human morphine, hyperventilation, the bestial sense of steadily increasing goon power—what could beat it? He felt he could kick down trees, drag elephants by the tail.

He lay off for a while, puffing, swinging his arms, rolling his shoulders to quiet the muscle spasms. He wiped sweat off his hands, face, and neck with the rag, vigorously rubbed his scalp and the back of his neck, then squatted for perhaps two minutes, closing his eyes. It was a good thing, keeping the old corpse in shape. Tended to encourage non-violence. He'd said once to Ellen's friend The Comedian, “I've got half a mind to break you in half.” “I do
believe
you have half a mind,” The Comedian had said, blinking slowly, grinning one-sidedly in his panic, “and I see you also have the muscles.” Almost by accident, as if the pipsqueak's wit were directed at someone else, Mickelsson had laughed.

He stood up again, loosened up the machinery—his whole body was soaking wet—and went back to it. After half an hour more he quit again, this time for good, rolled the weights back into their corner with his foot, then went into the bathroom, rinsed out the sweat rag, and showered. When he finished he found that even now he wasn't ready to face bed, so he put on his glasses and bathrobe and began wandering through the house barefoot, unconsciously opening and closing his paintbrush- and hammer-calloused hands, looking at objects as if he found them unfamiliar: the brushed steel face and knobs of the tuner and amplifier he never used—he switched them on, then immediately off again—the junk furniture he'd gotten to tide him over; magazines on the coffeetable, not a magazine in the stack that he would actually read without a gun at his head, except maybe
The New Yorker
for its cartoons, which he'd probably read already, he couldn't remember. He picked up the top
New Yorker
on the pile to check but then stopped, seeing again the whitened face behind the windshield sliding past him, crazily listing; and again he wondered, his skin crawling, what could have so frightened her? Where had she been?

With regard to the second question, where she'd been before he'd met her on the road half a mile below his house, the possibilities were not exactly rich. She could have been coming from here, his place, formerly hers, or she could have been coming from somewhere farther up the slope, or (less likely) somewhere beyond, the other side, deeper in the backwater wilderness of ridges, high lakes, and fog-bound valleys.

He'd driven up to the top several times, exploring, back in early September and October, and he'd tried a number of the back roads through valleys suddenly opening out behind, dirt roads descending quickly and recklessly, like spring-fed creeks. He'd seen very little to occupy anyone here on his own mountain, and it was doubtful that she'd come from much farther. A trailer or two, with immense woodpiles and jitneys in the yard, dark mongrel dogs that came out to yip and howl in indignation as you passed; here and there small tarpapered houses in the woods, no electric lights in most of them—places taken over long ago by squatters: shy, wolf-eyed people, watchful and still as bears as your car cruised by; and here and there he'd made out big, empty houses like dried-out gray skulls, houses the local children no doubt told stories about, once-grand, now-crumbling nightmare places, some furniture still left in them, perhaps in summertime the favorite old chair of a rattlesnake. Once, long ago, these high ridges had been farmed.

It was hard to believe that it could have been from higher on the mountain that the doctor had come, but the alternative was even more difficult to deal with, the idea that right here at Mickelsson's house the doctor had met someone or something that had sent her flying. Again and again as it invaded his thought he dismissed the idea, then found himself pausing to listen. At last, angrily, hoping to be rid of that feeling once and for all, he took the flashlight from the shelf at the head of the cellar stairs and searched the house inside and out. There was nothing to be found.

He poured himself a drink, but after one sip discovered that his stomach was too sour to put up with it, and poured the remainder down the sink. His mind was still weird from the weight-lifting, catching movements that weren't there, at the periphery of his vision. At last, one by one, taking his time, he turned the lights off—he'd turned on every last light in the place, even the watchlights on the barns—and with no light remaining but the lamp on his bedtable, he shrugged off his bathrobe, then picked off his glasses, pausing once to listen as he did so, his brow deeply furrowed—listening not only with his tufted ears but with the nerves of his back and the tips of his fingers. Then he crawled meekly under the covers, turned off the lamp, and lay belly up with the back of his head on his hands, elbows out, keeping his ears free. He stared at the pitchdark ceiling as if he had no intention whatever of going to sleep.

In the valley the 3 a.m. train went by. He listened as it sang along glens and cliffs, sliding eastward toward New York City, a huge, humming, dark-iron snake. Once there had been glowing-steel passenger trains on this line, rushing yellow windows. No more. He thought of New York's lights, not many of them now, cavelike alleys, tombstone-dark buildings. The train must be a hundred cars long. Lonesome sound, as the folksongs liked to say. How empty it made the night!—alas, an emptiness not just physical. Peter Mickelsson was no longer a child on the Wisconsin farm, cows scattered like old gray boulders across the moonlit pasture, hushed with rumination. Time had actually done to him what old people in his childhood had jokingly spoken of its doing—eyes glittering, as if merry—had poured the magic out of the world like well-water from a dipper. For him as for all those country songwriters and weary black blues-singers, not to mention high-class tragic poets of former times and places—Greece, Japan, China—or brooding philosophers, Diogenes in his barrel, Marcus Aurelius knee-deep in chickens, Boethius in jail—the day had come when suddenly the obvious goodness of life, the splendor in the grass, innocence of eye and ear were vanquished, gone as if they'd never existed, like Occident light from a Stoic's leaded window or spirit from a father's blue eye. How did human beings go on after such things—family deaths, ruin, the collapse of marriage with a woman once loved. …

It was unthinkable that nothing could be done about it. That was why Ellen and her friends had despised him, in San Francisco. They would sit “rapping,” drugged, far into the night, sprawled on the floor and on the lower reaches of the furniture, or flung like sated jackals on the lawn in back, dreaming up grand schemes to make the world a softer place. He would bait them with Nietzsche: “The wish to eliminate suffering is the wish to eliminate life,” and, “Pain is a good part of what holds societies together.” He would mockingly suggest—but he meant it more seriously than they knew—that they'd misunderstood human nature. “You've forgotten about
Schadenfreude,”
he said—he loved pulling fancy language on them, dropping it casually, as if any half-educated fool ought to know the term.

One of her friends, a tall, black-bearded young man named Vince, was particularly offended by all he said and stood for. “Far out!” he would say, looking up-from-under with foggy blue eyes, maybe trying to focus his minotaur-bulky shape. “Like, man, how can you go to, like, a great play—
King Lear
or something—and not come home horrified by the cowshit all around you?” From the darkness of the lawn beyond where Vince sat came a faint, weary chorus of yeah's. Ellen said nothing.

“Art makes heavy the thinking man's heart,” Mickelsson said. “Nietzsche.” He might easily have used Nietzsche in their defense, of course—for instance his idea on the imposition of form and order as a cause of suffering—but the temptation to defend was not strong.

The night in which they plotted and grieved over the oppressed was ironically sweet and still. The house looming against the stars was grandly Victorian, pre-fire; it was on the other side of Twentieth Street that the smaller, newer, though equally shabby buildings began. To the left of the house from where they lay in the yard (or, in Mickelsson's case, stood) an immense old evergreen pointed darkly at the moon.