Mickelsson's Ghosts (106 page)

In the doorway between the kitchen and livingroom he stopped, staring in astonishment. His son had arrived. He lay asleep in his rumpled clothes on the couch in the destroyed, now cleaned-up livingroom. Carefully Mickelsson approached and touched him, to see if he was real, then sniffed his hair, as if the sense of smell might be more worthy of trust than touch. The boy was dressed in black, his face to the back cushions of the couch. He half awakened now and turned his head, opening his eyes. “Hi, Dad.” He smiled. Mickelsson burst into tears. “You're home,” he said. “Are you all right?” For some reason, something in the boy's expression, he pressed his ear to Mark's chest. If the heart was beating, he couldn't hear it. When Mickelsson raised his head to look at Mark's face, the boy smiled and let his hand fall onto Mickelsson's—the hand was warm—then closed his eyes and, perhaps without meaning to, drifted back into sleep. With his free hand Mickelsson patted Mark's shoulder, or perhaps the cushion, or some pile of old clothes, maybe nothing at all.

Mark was still asleep at five o'clock that afternoon. Mickelsson moved restlessly, hardly making a sound except for a doglike whimpering of pleasure that he could have stopped at any moment, as a sick man can stop his moans. The ghosts or devils he'd thought he was rid of stood watching.

At seven o'clock that night, he realized that Mark was going to sleep for a long time. No doubt he'd been hitch-hiking for days; perhaps he had walked for miles. In Mark's duffle-bag, Mickelsson found objects he did not think he himself could have placed there by imagination: three cakes of yeast, a cardboard box containing riceballs. Surely Mark was really there. Mickelsson took a bath, strenuously thinking. Even when he squinted, his bad eyelid did not move. Outside the bathroom door, he could hear the old woman pottering about, as if waiting for him. It came to him what he must do.

He brushed past her and went to his bedroom to stand peering like a mole into his closet. A musty, dead smell poured out of it. He found a gray, striped suit he hadn't worn since his last convention, a French-cuffed shirt—he could find no cufflinks, but it would do, no one would notice—a Liberty tie, and in a plastic cleaner's bag, his scarlet huntsman's coat. He got an image of dead foxes, then banished it. If the coat had moth holes, she would not notice at first glance. He dressed, surprised at how easily the fly zipped clear to his slimmed-down waist. He slipped the scuffed belt through the loops and buckled it. He admired himself in the mirror, first head-on, then sideways. To tone down the redness of his face he patted a little plaster dust onto his skin like powder, then checked the mirror again. Much better. He darkened his eyebrows with a ballpoint pen, then extended his arms, smiling and bowing. “How do you do?” he said, and bowed. He tried it again. “How do you do?” Rifkin, behind his right shoulder, bared his teeth, disgusted. “You're faking this, Mickelsson,” he said: “why?” Mickelsson drew out his pipe, stuck it jauntily in his mouth, pulled in his belly and threw out his chest and smiled as if for a snapshot. “Because I'm a coward,” he said. “Why do you think priests wear funny hats?”

Uncertainty flashed through him, but instantly he quashed it. His shoes were lumpy, farmerish, and he had no black shoepolish. But if he carried himself properly, who would notice?

He heard the pump switch on, down in the cellar, and thought of the furnace. He was almost out of wood for the stove, too. What if his son were frozen when he got back? Like a Congressman, an oil magnate, a blood-red UFO, an angel, he floated to the head of the stairs, tugged at his coat, then with ceremonial steps went down.

At the foot of the stairs the old man stood bent forward, clasping his hands, staring out through the glass in the door to the porch.

Mickelsson shook his head and waved both hands. “Go away, devil. How can I help you when I can't help myself?”

The old man stared on, forlorn. Mickelsson went into the slain livingroom to get Jessie's gloves in their box. Mark was still asleep, lying on his back now. His face was pale; the hair, carrot-red, fell around his features like a clown-wig. He stirred but did not waken when Mickelsson bent down and kissed his forehead.

In his study closet Mickelsson found an Irish fisherman's cap with a feather in it, slightly mashed from careless storage, and at the coatrack in the hallway he drew on his black leather gloves and chose a cane, the silver-headed one. Then, with a nod to the figure at the sink—the old woman, heavy as a graveyard angel—he went out, softly floating, dismayed by the direction he must go to escape the fly-bottle.

The sky was full of stars. In the snow just short of the woods, six deer looked down at him. He saluted with his cane, like a general ordering the charge. All deer, bless their hearts, are virgins. He opened the Jeep door to put his cane in, slanting it along a fold in the thick black bear-rug where it would ride; then for a moment, eyes widened to miss nothing, he stood sniffing the breeze. It smelled sweet, and there was a rattling, roaring sound that he recognized after an instant as the waterfall. Thaw was upon them at last. Spring on its way. No applause! He raised both hands.

Carefully, trying not to damage his coat, Mickelsson climbed in, found his key—heaven was with him; it was the first his fingers touched—and switched on the ignition. The motor sputtered, coughed, then roared, jiggling the cab; the universal joint grumbled. No harm; happens on the best of planets. He pulled at his hatbrim and shoved in the clutch.

On the way to town he thought nothing, riding the world. He felt the old woman coming behind him, a blackness across the whole southern sky in the rear-view mirror.

To his surprise and horror, he found when he reached Jessie's house that the place was all lit up; she was having a party. Darkness rose behind the house, as if he were still in the Endless Mountains. Though he stopped the Jeep at a little space of curb right in front of her house—a space he might have thought, in another mood, had been miraculously saved for him—it seemed to him clear that he'd be a fool to go in. What fantasies one worked up, out there in the country! While he'd indulged himself, holed up like a woodchuck, far from human intercourse and its sweet travail, her life—their lives—had gone on, here in town, inevitably drifting apart from his, as irrevocably distancing as the endless drift of galaxies, and now, now that Mickelsson had found his bearings, he must acknowledge the truth, that it had taken him too long.
All right,
he thought. He looked down at the grand red coat and the black leather gloves, the knightly garb with which he'd meant to stun his Cosima, kingly suitor arriving in tarnished splendor to ask his lady's hand. He looked down at the cane and the glossy black bear-rug to his right, grand tsarist cloak over the Jeep's old battered plastic seats, broken springs.

He would sit for just a few seconds longer, looking in.

He became aware of the Jeep's steady jiggling and the rumbling of the motor, the clouds of oily smoke pouring up from the rear end like special effects from a clown-car in the circus, and partly because of the waste of gas, partly because he was sure to be noticed if he left the thing running, he turned off the engine. The jiggling stopped and an impression of silence leaped up all around him. Only an impression, he realized at once, because now he was aware of the sounds of the party, crisp and clean, comforting as music in the streetlamp-haloed air. He could hear voices and the sound of the stereo no one was listening to—good old Haydn, or else Mozart (he could never get the difference)—and all around him, here outside, another sound, subtle yet surprisingly distinct, once it caught one's attention: water moving gently in the gutter under his tires, occasional plump drops hitting the Jeep's tin roof.

Beyond the lighted doorbell and the parted curtains, Jessie's house was teeming with life. He could see shapes, undoubtedly people he knew, some of them anyway. It was a large party, probably allies. The moving silhouettes in the windows weighed on his heart. Sometimes on summer nights, in the big Wisconsin farmhouse, his mother and father had had parties like that—he could no longer guess what the occasion might have been; maybe family reunions. He and his cousins had looked in from the lawn, eager aliens, at the rooms full of grown-ups who moved back and forth beyond the curtains and drapes, eating and drinking, talking happily, their noise coming out into the huge, star-filled night, both loud and oddly distant, as if lost already in vanishing time. Ah, how he had loved them—those majestic grown-ups of his childhood, farm people gathered from far and wide, some of them not even names to him, but bright with life, luminous-faced Olsens, Johnsons, Ericksons, here and there a Schmidt or a Dupree. How he—and no doubt the cousins around him—had longed to be grown-up like them, making shy little jokes at the pretty young woman with braids wrapped tight as a glove around her head! And ah, how he loved these strangers too—these defenders of Jessie Stark—or potential defenders—against the powers of barbarism! “Sentimental, you may say,” he said to the heavy, breathing darkness around him, and brushed tears from his cheeks, “but perhaps you judge too quickly. These are all we can honestly call our own, these shitty human beings.” Granted, he should love the barbarians too—so reason demanded—since they too were human, and alive; and perhaps he did. However strong his feelings for Jessie, it was all still partly just war-games. Sitting like a stranger, looking in (God's spy), he could hardly miss how much there was of play in all these antics—here a grand party of anticipated victory or mourned defeat, somewhere else (down in basements in another part of the city, he liked to think) the crazy-bearded Marxists (some of them, he corrected himself) planning further strategy, banging tables with their fists. All his kinsmen, or none.

He became aware of dogs. They seemed to materialize from everywhere at once, at the sides of houses, on porches, or walking—fake casual—across the damp, shiny street. One in particular: a golden Lab bitch—ghostly or living, he could not tell—looking up at him with puzzlement and interest from the sidewalk in front of Jessie's house. She seemed about to speak.

Very well,
he thought, he would expand his view: partisan of the whole world's mammalian life. Take up Peter Singer's line: animal liberation. But mammalian life was it, his limit. Well, maybe birds. He sent his thought to the Lab: We understand, don't we! Happy the snake, eggs indifferently buried in the earth and forsaken!

The night seemed to be building toward a winter thunderstorm.

Time to leave,
he thought. The darkness at his back stepped closer. The same instant, he saw Jessie's face at a window, looking out, luminous as a moon. She seemed not to see the Jeep. Her face was like a heart, a flower. Her eyes bespoke something else. Terrible watchfulness. With a shock, he remembered making love to her.

The dogs sat observing, not barking yet, wondering what this hushed red beast might be up to. He became aware that Lincoln Street was also full of cats, some of them visible at windows or on porches, others not visible, psychically warm places in houses up and down the block. He felt the freezing chill that meant the old woman was right behind him.
“Help me,”
he whispered, but there was no one to help, and his mind had quit, utterly resourceless.

Then on Jessie's front porch he saw that someone was standing looking out at him, smoking a cigarette. Where he'd come from so suddenly, Mickelsson couldn't guess, but he knew the man's appearance was a gift, a sign. The shape of the man was familiar, though Mickelsson couldn't place it. He wore no coat. Perhaps he'd stepped out for a minute to escape the noise—yet that seemed not right. He was looking at the Jeep as if he'd seen it from inside and, pleased that Mickelsson had come, had stepped out to offer him greetings.

Again Mickelsson thought in dismay of the great confidence with which he'd dressed in his best and driven here to Jessie's, imagining a man could simply step into life again as if nothing ever changed. The light of the man's cigarette brightened, then dimmed. He seemed not to notice the cold at all. He stood very still in the soft, spring-scented breeze. Something touched Mickelsson's shoulder, making him cry out.

Abruptly, before he knew he meant to do it, Mickelsson got out of the Jeep, snatched up his cane and the box containing Jessie's gloves, and went briskly up the walk.

“Well, well!” he said, “it seems I've come on the right night.” He could smell the man's cigarette.

“Yes you have,” the man said. There was nothing in his eyes, and the movement of his mouth did not seem to mesh with his words. “I was afraid you'd decided you shouldn't come in.” He smiled. He had surprisingly crooked teeth. His voice, like a dream voice, made Mickelsson's bowels go weak.

For four heartbeats Mickelsson said nothing. Then at last he said, “You're Buzzy, I take it?”

Again the man smiled. His face, Mickelsson realized only now, was decayed, horrible. The flesh had fallen away from the bone of his nose. “I am. Yes.” He bowed.

“Jessie has spoken of you often,” Mickelsson said. “She misses you terribly, as I'm sure you're aware.”

The dead man nodded, his look noting and forgiving the fatuousness. “Shall we go in?”

“I don't suppose,” Mickelsson said, flexing the fingers of his gloves, “there's any reason for us to try and … talk?”

“Talk?” the dead man asked hollowly, and put his hand on Mickelsson's elbow—ice ran up Mickelsson's arm—“why should we stand around and talk?”

Mickelsson nodded. “Will she be angry at my barging in like this?”

The dead man studied him gravely, what remained of his mouth drawn to the left; then he asked—mouth unmoving—“How should
I
know?” With a gentle pressure on his elbow, he floated Mickelsson toward the light.

Jessie, when she opened the door, head lifted, stared at him in amazement, her smile frozen. She was unnaturally awake, like a deer, a hind. She seemed five years older, thinner, grayer, the flesh beginning to loosen from the bone. She looked from his foolish, fixed smile to the wooden box he'd immediately thrust into her hands, then to his red coat, then back at his face. A wince fixed itself around her eyes. At last, by an act of will, she forced back her smile. “Mickelsson!” she said. Clearly she couldn't see the corpse of her husband at Mickelsson's side, gazing indifferently around the blurry, aqueous room. She read the words on the box,
Jessie's Gloves,
wonderfully ornate, and she laughed, then blushed. She put the box on the table by the door. Mickelsson leaned his cane beside it. “Thank you,” she said. “It's very—nice.”