Mickelsson's Ghosts (26 page)

“You got water problems?” Thomas asked. His right hand paused a moment, then went on helping the left put Mickelsson's purchases in paper bags, then fit the bags into two large cardboard boxes.

“Not yet,” Mickelsson said, “but I expect them.”

“I guess first you need a dowser,” Thomas said. He straightened up, looking around the store for something.

“That how they do it?” Mickelsson said.

“Around here they do. You know John Pearson? I thought he was in here, a minute ago.” He leaned to his left, trying to see past counters to the rear of the store.

“He's a neighbor of mine,” Mickelsson said.

“He's supposed to be the best. I don't know, myself.”

Mickelsson reflected. At last, slightly smiling, he said, “He dropped by, not long ago. Wanted to sell me firewood. Mentioned something about the house being haunted.”

Owen Thomas looked at him, then decided to smile, looking away. “They say a lot of things, up there in the mountains. No TV reception.”

They both laughed, then stopped. John Pearson had stepped from behind a counter near the back and stood with his tufted chin raised, trying to see them with those bad eyes of his, trying to separate their shapes from the glare of the windows.

“There he is,” Thomas said, and returned to his packing.

Mickelsson hesitated, then moved down the aisle toward his neighbor. “Hello, there,” he said.

Pearson studied him, at last recognized him, and nodded. He stood even now with his chin slightly lifted, whether from near-sightedness or from some mood that was on him, Mickelsson couldn't tell. In his square right hand Pearson held, clamped between his thumb and first two fingers, a length of black stovepipe.

“I understand you're a dowser,” Mickelsson said.

“Use to be.” Pearson jerked back one side of his mouth for a grin.

“You don't do it anymore?”

“I might. Can't tell.”

They studied each other. The back of Mickelsson's neck tingled. He forced a grin and said, “I'm not sure I follow.”

He would wonder later if the old man hadn't waited longer than he needed to, as if enjoying Mickelsson's discomfort, before saying, “Sometimes it works, sometimes it don't. You never know, these mountains.”

“Yes, I see,” Mickelsson said. He felt himself breathing again and was once more conscious of the bright, pleasant store around him, clean coils of rope, red wheelbarrows, hickory-handled hoes and garden-forks. Pearson's boots were lumpy, permanently wrinkled; in his rolled-up cuffs there was sawdust. “I'll tell you why I ask,” Mickelsson said. “I've been thinking of having a well drilled, if I can—if there's reason to think I'll hit water.”

Again Pearson cocked back one side of his mouth. It was probably accidental that the grin looked scornful.

“I thought maybe if you could drop by with your dowsing rod, or whatever you use—”

“Can't do it for a while yet,” Pearson said. “Maybe come October—”

“That'd be fine—”

“And I don't guarantee.”

Mickelsson's smile had become stiff. “That's fine too. I understand, a thing like dowsing—”

“Cost you twenty-five dollars.”

Mickelsson stopped smiling. “I don't know,” he began.

“Always charge the same thing, whatever I dowse for—water, gold, dead people. I don't say it's worth it, not by a darn sight. But I guess you'd pay more for a plumber, come to that. Any darn fool can lay pipe.” If he was joking, he didn't show it.

Mickelsson tipped his head. “But a plumber guarantees his work,” he ventured.

“That's what they'll tell you,” Pearson said. He raised his left arm, ready to move Mickelsson aside as he would a bob-calf. “Wal, glad I run into you, Prafessor.”

As the old man started toward him, aiming for the register beyond, Mickelsson said, backing off a step, “All right, shall we say early October?”

“Sometime in October,” Pearson said. “See how things go.”

Mickelsson accepted it. Anyway, it didn't matter; he'd have no money this fall for well-drilling. He walked with the old man toward the front of the store, where Owen Thomas was now putting the two large boxes, along with the wallpaper books and paint, on the carpet of the right-hand display window. Pearson set the stovepipe on the counter.

“Get any squirrels?” Mickelsson asked.

Pearson looked at him blankly, as if the subject had never been mentioned between them. Mickelsson squinted, then realized that the man was, of course, just deaf.

He drove home the back way, past the large brick Catholic church—most of the people of Susquehanna were Catholics, those who lived in town; legacy of the railroad days, Italians and Poles, a few Irish and Welsh—then up past the old brick hospital where the doctor had worked, a schoolhouse-like building shabby and morose in a clearing just beyond the shade of huge trees, its back walls perched at the edge of a cliff that dropped away sharply toward ash-pits. He passed large, sagging houses, then smaller houses, once the homes of men who'd worked the railroad beds, houses now mostly empty, caving in, stripped of their doors and windowframes. Where houses were still occupied there were snowmobiles in the yards, and torn-down motorcycles. Photographer's heaven, he thought, and felt a pang of lonesomeness for his son. He remembered the photographs stacked, still wrapped in brown paper, in the livingroom of the house up on the mountain. They'd made his small apartment in town look like an art gallery, not any picture there more than two feet from another. Here he could spread them out, give them their due. They were splendid things, the whole set a gift from his son last Christmas: bicycles leaning against old shed walls, a plastic watering can among cinderblocks, dying trees, a spiderweb, portraits of friends, portrait after portrait of his sister. … As he turned onto the road leading to his house, Mickelsson found himself thinking suddenly, his stomach tightening, of his daughter. It was as if the photographs had made her more real to him than his memories could. The memories themselves became photographs. His mind fixed on one of Leslie at seven, struggling to read the
Babar
in French that Ellen and he, in their youthful folly, had bought for her. Ah, how determined they'd been to give their children culture, introduce them to languages early, while their minds were flexible! So now, though still a senior in highschool, his daughter was taking her second year of French literature at Brown, a lover of the snide, superior, hopelessly unlovable French.

“I don't really mean I hate the French,” Mickelsson said aloud, tossing up his hand in a French-style gesture for the benefit of whatever ghostly visitors might be listening beside or behind him in the Jeep. Then, hearing himself speak aloud, he scowled and thought,
How strange, this liberal intellectual timidity, this craven Judeo-Christian cowardice. Of course I hate the French!
At once he thought of Jean-Pierre, the exchange student who'd lived with them in Providence, and felt repentant. (He thought, in the same movement of mind, of Luther's dangerous doctrines—and Heidegger's on “national character.” If his heart agreed, it ought not to.) Though it was true that Jean-Pierre was full of ignorant opinions about America—for example saw the zucchini in the overgrown, untended garden (they'd been away on vacation) and said smugly, in his execrable English, “Ah, ze Americains, zay will nevair undairstand wiz vegatables, not?”—it was also true that a gentler, more tender-hearted creature never sallied forth on earth. “Very well,” Mickelsson negotiated, opening his right hand as if to show those around him that he saw their point of view, “I like the French all right, some of them. But you'll admit, they're an exasperating people.” He cringed from a memory of Leslie, then fifteen, sitting on the couch in the livingroom with Jean-Pierre, kissing him with a passion Mickelsson would have thought beyond her years, no light in the room but the flickering glow of the fireplace. They had managed without a word to make Mickelsson feel that he himself was the guilty one, walking in on them in his slippers. “Perhaps I was,” he said aloud. The image stayed with him—his daughter's startled, indignant face—until he consciously replaced it with another: his daughter in her nightgown, stretched out alone on her stomach in her bed, looking up from her poems of Victor Hugo toward where Mickelsson stood filling the doorframe, again in his slippers and robe. It was long after her bedtime, two in the morning.

“Hi,” she said.

“You're supposed to be asleep,” he said, tiresomely parental.

She flopped over on her back. Her eyes, shiny in the light of the doorway, were like dark mist, or maybe the deep blue of mountains toward nightfall. “You know something about French?” she said. He made the mistake of waiting. Her silver-blond hair fanned out beside her—her body, under the flannel nightgown, alarmingly thin but developing toward womanhood. She said, “It makes you see things a whole different way. Like a
cheval
is a completely different thing from a horse, but it
is
a horse, and so the next time you look at a horse you see
more.”

“Leslie,” he said, “it's long past your bedtime.”

She smiled and closed her eyes.
“Je t'aime, Papa,”
she said.

He'd arrived at his house now. He pulled over to his mailbox, praying that there would be no mail.

He must start writing something, he thought, walking up to the house. Its shadow fell over him. Something worth real money, this time. Such things were possible, not even prostitution. The world stood more in need of philosophy than it believed. Just get the world's attention, that was the trick—a mighty, zinging style (he was capable of that), an initial focus on matters of common, maybe prurient interest. He would be mocked, of course; he was mocked already. But there was much that could be said, starting with such subjects as rape, the modern return to witchcraft, the grotesque tendency he saw in his students to be willing to believe in anything, from the Great Green Soup Cure to saintly levitation—or believe in anything but the fundamental goodness of life. (He was conscious of standing back from himself, watching and listening to himself. The self he watched and listened to was florid, heavy. It gestured in angry jerks. His grandfather, influenced by Luther, would call the thing a devil. Mickelsson was powerless.) It could be done, he thought. There was hope. There was always hope! He would get out of all this—nothing to fear but fear itself, et cetera. He would start at once, begin the first chapter this very evening.

He (they) began to pace. Unconsciously, he'd set down the mail on the kitchen counter, one or two envelopes spilling onto the floor. Bills.

The next morning he was at Thomas's again, getting wallpaper rolls, paste, and brushes. He would start immediately, he thought, but then for no reason changed his mind and carried the whole caboodle down to the cellar to store till the proper mood was on him. “First a little writing,” he said aloud.
Little control here. Everything in order.

He'd meant only to stop in for a six-pack, to help him with his writing—he was naturally rusty, after all this time—but the bar had trapped him. It was more like a London pub than anything he'd ever before seen in America—no etched glass, no fine woodwork, no ornamentation but the off-and-on Schlitz and Genesee signs—but the sounds and feeling were much the same, despite the blare of country music on the jukebox: the aqueous roar of talk, both adults and children, the occasional yap of a dog, the thick haze of smoke like heavy silt. The woman at the bar called him “sweetie,” sliding him his Scotch and telling him the price, which was surprisingly low. After he'd paid, he moved carefully into the darkness of tables, each table covered with a red and white oilcloth and furnished with a dark, stamped-tin ashtray. The place was packed—farmers, stubbly working people, women with blackness in their eyes and mouths, fat female arms and thighs white as flour—and he'd almost adjusted to standing up, leaning on the dark back wall, when someone waved to him, shouting something—in all that ruckus he had no idea what it was the man shouted—and he made his way, pushing past the sea-sunken clutter of chairs, to where the man was making space for him. The man, young, wearing a blue workshirt, stood up and reached across toward him with a tanned, muscular arm. “Hay, Prafessor!” he shouted—the words just barely came through—”so you've fownd the waterhole!” Mickelsson realized at last that it was the real-estate salesman Tim.

“Say, Tim!” Mickelsson shouted back. “Small world!” He looked at the woman beside him. Blond, big-bosomed, slightly drunk. She seemed young to be drinking; only a little past his daughter's age. He tried to think of Tim's last name but couldn't. “Is this the wife?” he asked.

“Naw,” Tim said, laughing with boyish pleasure and shifting his handshake to a power-to-the-people shake. “This is Donnie. She's my cousin.”

“One of his many, many cousins,” Donnie said, and held her soft, plump hand up to Mickelsson. Mickelsson let go of Tim's hand to take Donnie's. She said, “You're the one that bought the ghost house?”

“That's it. I'm the one,” Mickelsson said. He drew back the chair across from them—the tables were so crowded he could draw it back only a few inches—then wedged himself into it. He raised his glass in wordless salute, then took a sip.

“Any trouble yet?” Donnie asked, leaning toward him and eagerly smiling. Her dress was a light flowerprint, almost transparent, wide open at the throat and plunging; no bra. Her white cleft instantly aroused him. He thought guiltily of Jessica Stark. The girl's face, in spite of the slight look of drunkenness, was as innocent and open as a child's. Compared to Jessica, she was as common as a kitchen sink.

“Not yet,” he said, and shook his head as if in disappointment.

“I can see you've settled in,” Tim said, as if proud to have been a part of it.