Mickelsson's Ghosts (28 page)

Now she laid aside the magazine and stood up, opening her robe. “I don't know what you should be afraid of. If I were you I'd be afraid of”—she met his eyes for an instant—”everything.” She pressed closer, one hand drawing his penis out of his pants.

It struck him that she wasn't at all afraid herself. Surely the whole thing was some damned country joke. Her light blue robe—something like polyester, very prim, the kind of thing a good suburban wife would wear when driven from her husband's bed by snoring—fell from her, and she rose on tiptoe, almost climbing up onto him. He bent his knees and lifted her in his arms. “Oof!” she cried, then laughed. He slipped in like magic. On the carpet at his feet, to the left of her chair, there were scattered records—Wings, Elton John, Stevie Wonder. She arched her back, leaning away from him, breasts rising.

“How much do I owe you?” he asked, breathing hard, still upright and wearing his trousers and shirt, plunged inside her, his two hands on her waist.

She moaned, shaking her head, closing her legs still more tightly around him. “I don't know. Five hundred? How much can you afford?”

“Jesus, not five hundred!” No doubt his voice showed his fright.

“Make it a hundred then. Times are hard.”

“How about twenty-five?”

Her eyes rounded. “That's really insulting!”

“Fifty?” A drop of sweat got in his eye.

“Ninety. You aware of how much time I let you have?”

“I can't! Really! I've got terrible financial troubles—you've got no idea! Seventy-five?” He tried to blink the sweat away. No use. She too was sweating. He could hardly hold her.

“OK,” she whispered, and suddenly clamped herself like a fist around him, alarmingly strong. “OK! Oh, Jesus!
Sold!”

Afterward, when he was zipped up again, hardly able to reconstruct how the whole thing had happened, sick with anxiety—and with guilt, too, since it was now clear to him that the girl was no more than a teen-ager—Mickelsson asked, handing her the check she'd finally agreed to accept from him: “Tell me something. Do you do that often? Upright like that?”

She laughed and held the check to the light. “How often does a poor country girl get seventy-five dahllers?”

His visitors were long gone when Mickelsson got home that night, or rather that morning; the sky was already beginning to lighten, and birds were singing in every bush and tree, like poor Mickelsson's heart. It was not that he'd ceased to feel guilty. Intellectually he had no doubt that what he'd done was very wrong, inexcusable in fact, and no doubt that if there were in fact a God, He ought to be shot for creating a world where young women so sweet and essentially innocent could be turned into playthings of masculine pleasure. But when he climbed out of the Jeep, giving the troll-doll a playful little tap to make it swing, it was not solid ground but dewy air he stepped on. It had of course not escaped his attention that she'd outrageously tricked him: she'd as much as told him so herself. And it was not that he'd forgotten how much money seventy-five dollars was in his present straits, or how far it was beyond her usual fee—as she'd mischievously let him know. But the truth was, he liked the trick, liked its bold, teasing wantonness—liked it almost as much as he liked her sweaty, plump young body, or the way she'd somehow banished from his mind all fear of going limp, or her oral expertise, or her shyness when he'd come out of the bedroom and caught her with her glasses on. He liked the way she'd said “Depressed area,” luring him into her trap—no country bumpkin, she, with language like that; a reader, as he'd seen, of
Cosmopolitan.
Above all, perhaps, he liked the way she'd let her feeling for him slip out, her suggestion that harm might come to him here, and the faint hint that she'd be sorry if that were to happen. So Mickelsson, smiling to himself as he walked toward his house, went over in his mind every moment of the time he'd spent with the girl. Once again, he found, he was in a state of semi-erection.

Getting his keys out—letting his hand, inside his trouser pocket, rest longer than necessary against his partial erection—Mickelsson went suddenly still all over. The door, which he was sure he'd locked behind him as always, stood open. Fear crackled through him, and without thinking he stepped back at once behind the chimney, out of view. He listened for a long time, heart racing. It seemed to him he'd never heard the old house so still before. At last, slowly, stepping carefully on the flagstones, he moved back to the open door, then in. For a full three minutes he stood, hardly breathing, in the kitchen, listening with every nerve. It took another five minutes for him to move, freezing each time a board creaked, to the closet in the study, where he groped in the darkness until his hand found the silver-headed cane. Then, with the cane gripped like a bat, he switched on the study lights.

It was like a scene from some junky movie: books torn from the shelves, papers and manila folders everywhere. He could hardly believe he hadn't sensed the condition of the room as he crept in; but of course that was not what he'd been watching for: every sense had been tuned for one thing, the dangerous intruder. He began to breathe normally—somehow he knew, the minute he saw the mess, that whoever had come was now gone.

And of course he was right. They'd looked for whatever they were looking for behind the couch cushions, in the bedrooms, everywhere. He touched nothing, intending to call the police—merely stood looking at the jumble, room after room. Then, with the telephone receiver in his hand, he began to think clearly. The police would know—like everyone else in Susquehanna, no doubt—where he'd been, and why his visitors had felt free to take their time. He saw again the crowded bar—men, women, and children, even dogs and, no doubt, cats, though he'd seen none. Nowhere in town could he have stood out more plainly, except possibly in one of the churches. The realization was comforting, in a way: it was not necessary to believe that Tim or Donnie had purposely set him up. Someone had seen what was happening at Tim's table, had seen the professor go out onto the street with Donnie. …

He hung up the receiver, frowning, the call unmade, and began a more systematic, more intelligent search of the house. Nothing was missing—not his typewriter, not the stereo—nothing, so far at least, but three cartons of Merit cigarettes and all his pipe tobacco.

“Kids!” he said aloud, and almost laughed. He knew, suddenly—or so he imagined—what they'd been looking for. He was a professor, one of those strange outsiders you read about. They'd been looking for dope! Now he did laugh, self-consciously, oddly like an actor—so he thought even as the laugh poured out. He thought of their mad dream as they tore books from his shelves, their hope that one of the books would prove hollow, full of Quaaludes, or coke, or marijuana. On impulse he went to check the refrigerator. Sure enough, all his beer was gone. He went to the livingroom and opened the closet, below the stereo, where he kept his whiskey. Wiped out.

“Paltry!” he said aloud, raising his right fist at the lighted windows onto the porch.

All his body was charged with imperatorial scorn (the light in the sky was reddish yellow now, and the roar of the waterfall across the road was like a rumble in his brain), but, for all the acting, a part of him drew back. He remembered faintly, not in words, something odd about the bathroom, where he'd gone earlier to relieve himself. Now, in front of the toilet, bending close to the bowl, not quite sure what he was after, he got a scent of alcohol. The kitchen sink smelled the same, but more noticeably of beer. He went out, on a wordless hunch, to check the garbage cans. Nothing; but the hunch was stronger in him now. He walked to the cluttered, overgrown ditch behind the barn across the road. He stood with his head bowed, hands behind his back, looking down at new bottles glinting in the red morning sun. He made no careful count, but he was sure. They were here, all those bottles that had been stolen from him. He moved down, as if someone had suggested it to him, toward the burdock patch between the barn and the pond and waterfall, and began to bend down the burdock stalks with his right foot. Within fifteen minutes he'd found the three cartons of Merits.

There were more things to think about than he could possibly deal with, tired as he was. Someone had torn his house apart and had tried to make it look like the work of kids. He began to feel uneasy again about Tim and Donnie.

The worst part was humdrum. He needed a drink, and they'd poured out all he had.

He walked back up to the house, the world around him like a blurry old movie. He remembered mornings in Heidelberg. Drunk and hungering for a drink at 6 a.m. The grass gave gently under his feet as he crossed the yard. Birds warbled fiercely all around him.

There was no reason to think they'd had anything to do with it, Tim and Donnie. The bar had been packed. Who could know what crazies had been watching him through the gloom? Yet it was true that if he were a native here he might know. They all might know. He thought again of calling the police.

He was still thinking of calling the police when he lay down on the couch in the livingroom for a moment to think, maybe grant himself a few minutes' sleep. When he awakened—from a series of dreams about Donnie—it was late afternoon.

9

“Hi, Pete! Finney here!” The line sputtered and crackled in protest. In his mind Mickelsson saw the bloated, lead-gray face, here and there suffused with a dark red blush, and the gray, swollen paw, also blush-splotched, with rings on the fingers and tiny curling hairs, the hand fatly clamped as if for dear life around the shiny black receiver.

“Hello, Finney.”

“Listen, we've talked with the lawyers of the lady—ehhh, thank you, Shirley, no, I'll get back to him—we've talked with the lawyers of the lady, nothing fancy, just boilerplate, and I figured I better touch base with you, sort of see if you still got your socks on.”

Mickelsson waited. He was in the middle of the third page of the blockbuster book he was determined to write. The study around him was only partly straightened up. He had no time for fooling with housecleaning: his mind was wheeling, careening with ideas—thanks to Donnie Matthews (he'd finally remembered the last name he'd written on her check). Even when he was deep in thought about what he was writing, the memory of the girl was all around him in the air, and for all his weight and furious concentration he felt as if he were floating. He must see her again—he'd decided that even before he'd left her. Once, picking up his week's supply of Di-Gels at Reddon's Drugs, a scent drifting over from the rack of perfumes, colognes, and nailpolishes had caught him unawares and he'd believed he might have heart failure. He'd hunted through the bottles, trying to discover which scent it was that so powerfully brought her back to him, but before he could isolate it his nose had become confused. He wished he'd stolen something from her—a hankie; even a button would have served. She filled his writing with power and life. It was a strange and wonderful effect. Sometimes he would stop and, dreaming of her, would masturbate.

“You hear me all right?” Finney asked.

“I can hear you.”

“Good, good. I went over the settlement you proposed and they were very professional about it. They didn't laugh.” Finney laughed, explosive. Mickelsson could see his chair yawing back precariously, his fat left arm flying up in the air as if inviting an audience to laugh with him. “They were brilliant, in fact, considering it takes three of 'em to figure out who should go pee. Ha ha! They listened to that dream-scheme from Candysville, offering the lady the Taj Mahal if it's not too much trouble for her, otherwise you could give her the Empire State Building and the Brooklyn Bridge, and after it's over they have the alligator balls to look solemn, as if maybe it's not enough.”

After Finney's pause had lengthened for a moment, Mickelsson brought himself to ask, “What did they say?”

“Well, the lady lawyer—Lincoln, that's her name, no shit—she folds her hands like she's in Sundayschool and she looks very concerned. You offer your former spouse, free gratis, for just existing—a dubious virtue, all things considered—the house and the car and fifteen hundred a month, which is more than you make, if you'll come out of the clouds for just a second and think it over, more than you make after taxes, not to mention the taxes you forgot to pay last year—”

“I didn't forget.”

“Just playin with ya, kid. You're offerin her more than you make, that's the point, plus house, plus car, books, paintings, records, swimming pool—and your wife's lawyer is very concerned that your wife might not be able to get by on that.”

Mickelsson sighed and, to keep himself from reading over what he had in the typewriter, covered his eyes with one hand. “Why not?”

“Well, you know how it is these days,” Finney said. “Kids in college, no scholarships—why should they need scholarships? Rich professor's kids, right? And all the lady's expenses, not to mention her friend's—she sent me a breakdown; I'll slap it in the mail. Heat bills, travel expenses, food and clothing, liquor, car repairs, doctor bills, life insurance—hundred thousand dollars on you, that's how much she values you; I bet it makes you proud!—but of course she can't pay it, where'd the little woman get money like that?—also lawyers' fees, three of 'em, gotta be well-protected. Put it all together it comes to about double what you offered her, champ; otherwise no dice.”

“That's crazy.”

“What the fuck does she care?” He laughed.

Mickelsson could see him, self-consciously chortling, blue eyes smouldering, angrier at his client than at his client's ex-wife—not without reason, from a lawyer's point of view.

“So what am I supposed to do?” Mickelsson said.

“Cancel the offer, the whole ball of wax, that's my advice. The money you've been sending her, don't send her another thin dime, drive her ass into court and let the judge decide.”