Mickelsson's Ghosts (80 page)

“I don't know,” Mickelsson said, tensing his brow with concentration and hiding the tremble of his lips behind his hand. He moved close to the window in the open door to look in at the dial. Though the Jeep had been running for only a couple of minutes, the temperature needle was already near the red.

“Could be the thermahstaht's stuck,” the boy beside the fender said, and gave a little laugh. He didn't sound as if he thought it would be that easy.

“Smell that?” the boy at the steeringwheel said. When he smiled, his wide mouth tipped up suddenly at the corners.

Mickelsson nodded. The smell was familiar; a musty, burning smell. He realized only now that it was trouble.

The heavy-set, thick-shouldered boy outside went around the front and opened the hood, then poked his head and upper body in under it, disappearing. “Shut her ahff a minute, Perry,” he called.

The engine shut off with a tubercular chuff-chuff-chuff. The boy on the engine fiddled with things, then called, “Stahrt her up again.”

The motor started up and sounded good for a moment, then worse than before. Smoke came up. The boy in front waved at his brother, a slow, graceful movement like the flying motion of an eagle's wing, and the one at the steeringwheel turned off the engine and, after a moment, came away, closing the door. They both stood with their hands in their pockets, elbows out, looking in at the engine like graveside mourners.

Mickelsson leaned nearer. Though he knew nothing about motors, even he could see that this one was peculiar. What he noticed first was a spring that didn't look like an auto part—possibly a spring from some farmer's screen door. Then he noticed that a hose coming from the radiator was held on to the thing it hooked to by a piece of coat-hanger wire. One could still see the question-mark-shaped hook for the closet rod. Where a number of wires came together, there was a blackened clothespin. It was that—the clothespin—that made his heart sink.

“Think you can fix 'er, Jim?” the younger one asked. When he smiled, the perfect white teeth transformed him to a child.

The older one, Jim, lowered the hood and said, “We can tow her in if you want.”

Mickelsson pulled his glove off to hunt through his pockets for a Di-Gel. “How much do you think it will cost to fix?”

“You got water in your oil,” the older one said. “Could mean you need a new engine. If that's what it is, and if we can find an old junker, we could hold it to five, six hunnerd dahllers.”

“Jesus,” Mickelsson said, and bit his lip. “If you don't mind waiting,” he said then, and looked shrewdly at the older boy, then at his brother.

“We're in no hurry,” the older one said. “We got all the time in the world.” He smiled and shrugged.

“In that case …” Mickelsson said. “God knows I need the Jeep. If it's all right with you …” He got out his billfold. In the bill compartment he had fifteen dollars. “Will this cover towing?”

“Keep the ten,” the older boy said, putting the five in the pocket of his shirt. “Merry Christmas!” He gave Mickelsson a bow and raised his right hand as if to shade his eyes, smiling, forming a soft salute that might have been Chinese.

So Christmas came and went. Mickelsson saw no one, went nowhere, except for his furtive runs to the hardware store or post office, though he did talk briefly with Jessie on the phone. She called, ostensibly, to ask if she'd left her gloves. Neither of them mentioned Jessie's trouble with her department. He knew that it was up to him to bring it up. She was no doubt hurt that he'd still done nothing to help, but he knew her pride. If he didn't feel like helping, the hell with him. He didn't like himself for keeping silent on the matter, but he kept silent. New Year's came and went (Mickelsson spent New Year's Eve at home, not even drinking, but only because he'd forgotten what night it was) and still he kept himself busy in the cellar, all his lights off upstairs, and put off driving in to Binghamton.

Though he thought of it again and again—looking over at the gun, or picking it up to feel the heft of it, run his fingers along the stock, the cool, blue barrel—he did not go hunting. The cat no longer showed nervousness when Mickelsson picked up the shotgun. He seemed a little more wearied, if anything. What the ghosts thought, Mickelsson couldn't tell. He could avoid both the cat and the ghosts by working down in the woodshop, where neither showed their faces. He kept the phone off the hook. The cellar became crowded with his, so to speak, works.

The first night he didn't leave the phone off the hook, hoping he might hear from his son or daughter—they always called late—he got a call from Edie Bryant. “Isn't it wonderful about the hostages?” she said. He couldn't tell whether or not her voice had a hint of irony. It seemed there was a possibility of a breakthrough while Carter was still in office. Then Edie got down to what she'd really called about.

She was just sick, she said, about what those people were doing to Jessie, and to tell the truth she was very very cross with Mickelsson. “You're the only person that can help her, you know,” she said. “Phil says so too, and he ought to know, with all his experience in administration. That Blickstein makes me so mad ah could just
spit!”

“It's as bad as that?” he asked.

“Peetuh, if you'd just drive in here and
talk
to some people—talk to the president himself, if you have to. Even if you weren't some famous philosopher, you could make 'em sit up and notice. They're afraid of you. Phil says the same thing. They think you're crazy, you know. They're afraid you might punch 'em right in their little ole mouths. I tell you, I'd
approve.
Do 'em a world of good, that's my opinion! Sometimes it's the only way to get folks' attention.”

Mickelsson laughed.

“And you should phone up Jessica,” Edie said. “It's not right that woman havin to go it all alone.”

“I imagine it's hard for her, all right.” He wondered how Edie had learned that he wasn't keeping in touch with Jessie.

“You call her now, hear? And get in that ole Jeep and get right down here and do some talkin. Isn't it just like 'em, pullin a stunt like this at vacation time when nobody's around?”

When she paused, waiting, Mickelsson said, “I doubt that they'll get away with it.”

“Well, they'll sure as hell try,” she snapped. Then, after a moment: “You promise me you'll phone up Jessie?”

There was no way out. “I'll do it right away,” he said.

“Good,” she said. “Listen now, you come on by and visit sometime?”

“I will.”

After Edie Bryant's call he fixed himself a large martini and began drinking it, too fast, pacing back and forth in the livingroom. Outside the windows it was pitch black.

There could be no doubt that his failure to help Jessie was objectively wrong. It had no doubt been quite innocently that Edie had learned he was out of touch with Jessie; something Phil or Tillson had said, perhaps, about his failing to pull his weight; or some innocent question to Jessie: “How's Peetuh, deah?” “I haven't heard from him in weeks.”

Yet the materially irrelevant suspicion kept nagging him: the age-old conniving of women, Edie and Jessie in indignant
tête-à-tête;
Jessie proud and injured, showing perhaps more feeling for him than she meant to, and Edie rising to it, determined to fix things, drag the straggler back into the fold. Jessie bursting into tears, perhaps. (The imagined scene grew cloudy. He couldn't picture her bursting into tears, though he could imagine anger.) Surely a man had a right to withdraw, shutter up his windows, bar his door—especially such a man as he was, unwittingly a destroyer—and to hell with the eternal soft conspiracy of womanhood!

He fixed himself another large martini. The problem was not that he didn't understand what was wrong but that he understood too well. He had isolated himself, partly by accident, partly by intent, and now all that was normal, reasonable, unthought-out. …

“Just call her,” he broke in on himself. “Just pick up the fucking goddamn phone.”

Her phone rang and rang. He did not notice that it was now almost midnight. He had a fleeting thought—a flash of irritation—of the medieval courtly lover, poor miserable worm crying out in secret for miraculous grace. There was a difference, of course. The courtly lover, in his pitiful way, suffered for his lady, secretly served her with all his heart and mind. What they had in common, he and the goof with the lute, was despair.

“Hello?” she said, husky with sleep.

Now, suddenly, he did realize what time it was.

“Jessie?” he said. “It's me. Mickelsson.”

“Oh,” she said, then after a moment, “Jesus. What time is it? Are you all right?”

“I'm sorry to call so late. To tell the truth, I didn't realize …” Jessie said nothing.

“I got a call from Edie Bryant,” he said. “She tells me—”

She said, “Edie?”

He said, “I've written a couple of letters. I'm sorry I was out of touch.” His glass was empty, and the phone cord was too short for him to get to the bottle. “Can you hang on a minute?” he asked. “I'm sorry … I'm sorry. …”

“Listen,” she said, “Jesus, Pete—”

“Just one second,” he said. “Hang on.”

He couldn't find the gin, though he knew it was there. He took the Scotch bottle instead and sploshed half a glass over the fragments of martini ice.

“I've written a couple of letters,” he said. “I have an appointment with the president tomorrow morning. We're not going to let them get away with this!”

“The president's out of town,” she said. “Why are you saying all this?”

“You don't believe me?” He threw his heart into it.

“What's the difference,” she said.

Righteous indignation felt so good he kept it up. “You think I'm drunk, don't you. You think this is all empty talk!”

“You, Mickelsson?”

He clenched his teeth and stared for a moment at the wall, checked by her indifferent irony. “Lot of times people think I'm drunk when it's something else,” he said at last. “I'll tell you the truth. I hide behind this apparent drunkenness. Mental problems. I don't want to go into it, but you can ask my psychiatrist. I'll give you his phone number.”

“Pete, I really am tired,” she said.

“Did I tell you what really happened to me in Providence? I won't take long; it's just that I want you to know, so that you know you can trust me—as long as I'm not flat-out crazy. Or maybe you don't want me to tell you, maybe you're not interested.”

“Of course I'm interested,” she said. “I'm also gonna be sick if you don't let me get some sleep.”

Quickly—making a show of how quickly and briefly he was doing it—he told her about his episodes, how he would put on the red hunting coat and put white on his face, as the mime troupe used to do, and how he'd talked with dead things, had seemed actually to converse with them, though he could remember no details. “Anyway, the point is,” he said at last, “with all that's been happening out here—the ghosts, if that's what they are, and these dreams I've been having—I've been feeling a little panicky and, well, I guess self-absorbed. That's why I haven't—”

“OK,” she said. “All is forgiven.”

“I know you don't need all this,” he said.

“That's true.” For all her effort to sound kind, she sounded distant. Alerted by his bullshit language, perhaps: “You don't need all this.”

“I'm sorry I haven't been there when you needed me.”

“It's all
right,”
she said.

“I'm sorry I woke you up,” he said.

There was a silence. He felt a crazy movement of the heart toward glee. She saw through him!

She said, “What do you mean, dreams you've been having?”

“Nothing really,” he said, “that is, they never quite come to anything. I dream about the old people, something awful is about to happen, but then I wake up.”

The line was silent for so long he wondered if she'd dropped off to sleep. Then she said, “Pete, you should come in to a party and get roaring drunk.”

“Just a minute ago you were telling me I drink too much.”

“Only that you drink alone too much,” she said, and gave a laugh. “Did the Bryants invite you to the brunch they're having?”

“I'm not really up to the Bryants right now,” he said. He felt a pang at not having been invited. “All the politics and religion. Politics and guilt. Or worse yet, Art. I like it better when he talks about dying whales.” A nastiness had crept into his voice; he saw he must find his way back to something inoffensive. He mopped away tears with his handkerchief. “What was that play Phil was quoting, that night here at my place?” He mimicked the sepulchral voice: “ ‘When I consider life, 'tis all a cheat; / Yet, fooled by hope …' ”

“I don't think it's Shakespeare. I wouldn't know that kind of thing.”

“The Bryants make me gloomy,” he said, “especially Edie. She's so
interested.”

There was another hesitation. He imagined her closing her eyes. “She means well. It scares her that everyone's not as happy as she is.”

“You think she's happy?” He found it an interesting question, in fact. That Southerners' habit of warmly remembering community and carrying the memory through life in their mouths.

Jessie sadly laughed. She was sounding farther and farther away. “As happy as she thinks she ought to be, then.” The line was silent, just a forlorn humming sound, as if all the way to Binghamton the phone-wires were bound in ice. Then Jessie asked: “Have you talked with your kids? Did they send Christmas cards?”

“Presents, in fact,” he said. His voice sank a notch deeper in its gloom. Again he mopped at his face. “A carving from Mark. I guess he did it himself—he's never done that before, carvings, I mean. But it's got the look. Very strange—interesting. Bunch of children praying.”