Mickelsson's Ghosts (7 page)

“That's one of the people we treat.” He nodded again, a barely perceptible movement, like a boxer's feint.

“Is that what you mostly do?—study the old-timers? Or do you make up philahsaphy on your own?” Now he turned back, his head still leaning toward the window, to look at Mickelsson.

“We do a little of both, most of us.” He was beginning to feel it was time to change the subject.

But Tim was interested. “You write about things like what's really owt there?” He took his left hand from the steeringwheel to wave generally at the world.

“Well, in a sense—” Still with the grin locked on, he got out his cigarettes.

“Boy, that's interesting stuff, that's all
I
can say,” Tim said, and shook his head. “You ever work on ghosts, or people that can see into the future and that?”

Mickelsson hesitated. “Some philosophers work on such things,” he said at last. “William James, more recently people like C. D. Broad. As for myself …”

“The world's a weird place, when you think abowt it,” Tim said. Though he was still smiling, he was watching Mickelsson closely. Now Mickelsson had his matches out. He lit the cigarette.

Shale bluffs rose up on each side of them, large locust trees arching across the gap. Then they came out into the hazy sunlight again, and they could see the Bauer place above them, rising sharp-gabled against the mountain. The hexes on the barns, squarely lit, looked oddly grim today, more recently painted than the walls they adorned, yet more ancient nonetheless, archaic as runes.

Mickelsson would hardly remember, later, his inspection of the house that first time he'd gone up with Tim. Everything in it had been better than he'd hoped for—the rooms larger, the views from every window more surprising. If the decor was not to his taste, he'd hardly noticed. In any event, most of it would go when the owner moved. (Pressed-board bookshelves, Swiss-dotted curtains, hospital-style drapes …) He would make changes, a number of them, but none of that especially occupied his mind as he walked through the house with Tim and the large, light-voiced woman, Dr. Bauer, the owner. She was pale and even taller than Mickelsson. She seemed to have accepted the fact of her height; she walked as if it were the rest of the world that was peculiar.

He'd pretended to weigh things carefully, nodding, frowning, trying the upstairs faucets (not so good), but his decision had already been 90 per cent made when he'd stepped over the threshold. The inside, he found, struck the same mysterious chord in him. Once when he was seven or eight he'd been taken to the stark frame house in Minnesota where his mother had grown up. This was somehow like that, he thought, not that the houses were the same in color or shape or smell or any other physical detail that he could notice. …

Light fell in tinted, dusty beams through the stained-glass panes of the arched door into the entryroom and draped itself over the bottom three stairs and around the newel post. When the owner stepped into the splay of light and her black, homely shoes turned as blue as barnflies, Mickelsson gave a little start and looked suddenly into her eyes. She smiled, no doubt puzzled, and glanced up at the shadows at the top of the stairs.

When he stepped into Tim's office to announce the verdict on his loan application, he found that Tim already knew. “Easy as pie, hay?” Tim said, rising behind his completely bare desk, stretching his muscular arms out wide in welcome, grinning from ear to ear.
“O-kay!
How
abowt
that!”

“You already heard,” Mickelsson said, grinning but accusing.

“Well, you know these small towns,” Tim said, and laughed. “I guess all we have to do now is arrange for a meeting with the doc's lawyer in Montrose.” He pronounced it
Mont-rose.
“Sign the papers,” he explained. “If you want to bring a lawyer of your own, that's fine, or I guess you could both use the doc's lawyer—” His eyes met Mickelsson's, then skidded off.

“That'll be all right,” Mickelsson said; and it would be, he knew. It was strange how safe he felt in Tim's hands. Why not one same lawyer, in fact?—though Finney, when he heard, would howl. How long had it been since Mickelsson had been anywhere where trust was standard? He thought of his reviewers—those who disliked him—whining like band-saws, no more interested in truly representing his thought, not to mention understanding it, than in describing the aesthetics of bingo. Not that Mickelsson brooded often on reviews; more were favorable than not, in any case, though the reviews in the supposedly prestigious journals were always unrelentingly scornful, written by pedantic young men and women from “the best universities,” little pricks who intended to go far, come hell or high water. “In this thin yet surprisingly repetitive little tract …” “Without mentioning Ayn Rand, though his dependence falls little short of plagiarism …”

“Well,” Tim said, and grinned again, “all right, I'll arrange it.” The barely perceptible cloud over his mood had passed, some doubt removed. “You free Tuesdee?”

Who was ever, in this sad, long-winded universe, free?

“I can manage it, I think,” he said, and laughed.

Instead of driving straight back to Binghamton, that afternoon, he drove out past the house again, then farther into the mountains, turning onto whatever road seemed to beckon. He drove lost for hours, breathing the zesty air in deep, passing high, sunlit meadows, lakes, wooded entrances to summer camps with Indian names or noble-hearted names, “Equity Camp,” “Camp Sky“—here and there a farm with tall blue silos and fields bounded by stone walls. In the end he accidentally circled back into Susquehanna—or rather, as it seemed, came upon one more pretty little village which suddenly, as he crested a hill, turned into a place much larger than he'd thought it, a town of brick streets plunging hell-bent down a steep mountainside toward a wide, solemn river—now broad, now narrow tree-lined streets following a series of deep, shady ravines with hurrying dark water and ferns in their basins, and above, glum old poverty-battered houses propped up on stilts or slate-gray, water-seeping walls, occasional small stores, steep lawns that old men or old women mowed by playing out and hauling back ropes they'd attached to their lawn-mower handles. He wasn't aware that he was back in Susquehanna till he came upon the traffic light and the bank sign,
COUNTY NATIONAL
, and, in computer lights,
62°,
then
7:13.
On the watchers' bench tonight there were only two old women, one of them eating an ice-cream cone. He thought of stopping off for supper at the town's one restaurant, or anyway the only one he'd found so far; but inertia and the shabbiness of the place kept him going. He would take in his new world a little at a time. Beside the curbs, up on the sidewalks, and in the Acme Supermarket parking lot, there were big-tired pickup trucks with airbrush flames pouring up, circus-yellow and -red, from the engines and, on the cabs' back windows, sleazy Western landscapes: elk and bear, leaping fish, mountain lakes. He turned in to the rough stone underpass that led onto the long iron bridge, green as algae, spanning the river.

Driving on the crooked road that followed the Susquehanna—not hurrying, getting the feel of the walled-in, shadowy valley, giving himself time to admire the blood-red sunset lighting up the tops of mountains and the undersides of clouds—feeling himself pleasantly alone in the world, everything around him serene, asleep—he came upon a stretch of road where cars were parked bumper to bumper on both shoulders: cars of every description and make—new Cadillacs and Lincolns, neatly kept seven- or eight-year-old Plymouths, Hondas and Saabs, Volkswagens, beat-up campers. (He did not notice until later that the license plates were all from far away.) It seemed to him the strangest thing in the world—here, miles from nowhere, all these cars. He drove for a mile or so between these hedges of tightly parked vehicles, their roofs and windows lighted by the sunset—beyond them, on the left side, the broad, still river moving silently past weighed-down willowtrees and mountains. Then he saw that the road ahead of him was blocked: taillights in the right lane, parking-lights in the left. He pulled up behind the taillights—it turned out to be a panel truck with several cars ahead of it—and after a moment switched off his engine. At first there seemed no one around. Then he saw the red glow of cigarettes over among the trees beyond the cars on the left-side shoulder. He got out, shut the car-door behind him, pressed his hat on more firmly, and, shoulders hunched, went to find out what was wrong.

In the grove of flowering locusts beside the road there were dark silhouettes of men and women, people standing with their backs to him, now and then saying a word or two, occasionally laughing, looking down, where the trees parted, at the still, burning river. “What's up?” Mickelsson was about to ask, but then drew in a sharp breath instead and, without thinking, took off his hat and bent forward.

In the winding, wide, perfect mirror below, hundreds of people, adults and children, stood sunk to the waist or higher. They didn't seem to be fishing or dredging for a body. … To the man at his right he said, “What's going on down there?”

“Mormons,” the man said, and reached out, trying to catch something, perhaps a moth. He was young, frazzle-bearded, dressed in mechanic's coveralls. His accent was richly Susquehanna. “Every year abowt this time they come owt here and try to drown each other.” He reached out again.

“Drown—” Mickelsson began, then understood that, despite the man's tone, and despite the sombre landscape that made it half credible, it was a joke. “Ah,” Mickelsson said, and laughed. He got out his pipe. After a moment he asked, “Why here?”

“Holy land,” the young man said, then turned to look up at him, interested to meet a being so ignorant, a city feller in a suitcoat, willing to be instructed. “You ever hear of Joseph Smith?” He cracked a laugh.

Mickelsson nodded, then inclined his head. When he lit the match for his pipe, he saw that the young man's face was round and dimpled, filthy with oil or maybe soot. The woman and the fat man beyond him had faces creased with age, though they were probably not old. Their teeth were sharply outlined.

“He used to live right back there.” The young man pointed past Mickelsson into the darkness. “Other side of the graveyahrd. Lived in a lot of diffrint howses arownd here, but that was one of 'em.”

“Ah!” Mickelsson said again. “So that's what makes—”

“Sh!”

The woman on the other side of the young man, apparently his wife, gat-toothed and pregnant, jerked her gray face forward and raised her fingers to her lips. The two women beyond her and the fat, sighing man, in a Phillies baseball cap, looked over in Mickelsson's direction with interest. Several feet beyond the fat man stood a small boy in glasses, who never moved or spoke. There were others. Twenty or thirty feet farther on Mickelsson could make out bearded men and women in dark formal clothing—in the darkness that was as much as he could tell. He remembered hearing somewhere, from Jessica Stark, perhaps, that there were Mennonites up in the mountains. A mosquito landed on his neck and he slapped it.

Now a strange sound came from the river—at first impossible to identify, then the next instant so obviously what it was that Mickelsson could hardly believe it had eluded him. They were singing. The bearded young man poked Mickelsson's arm with the back of his hand and, when Mickelsson looked down, held something toward him—a bottle, he thought at first, but when he somewhat tentatively accepted the offer, feeling a quick little flush of distress, the bottle turned into binoculars. “Oh. Oh, thank you,” Mickelsson said, still startled by the magical transformation, and raised the binoculars to press them against the lenses of his glasses. At first he could see nothing but a colorful blur. He moved the binoculars from side to side and up and down until large, gawky shapes swung into view, disappeared, then appeared again. He realized for the first time that some of the Mormons were wearing white robelike things, sleeveless. He looked for several seconds. Some of the people looked eighty or more, standing there in the ice-cold water with their mouths open, grimly enduring. Their mouths and eyes were like pits. Fogwisps hovered over the water around them. Then he remembered that the binoculars were on loan and gave them back.

“Is that
robes
they're wearing?” Mickelsson whispered.

“That's that underwear they gaht,” the man said.

His wife shot a look at him to hush him.

Ah yes, Mickelsson thought. He'd once spent a week at the University of Utah. Someone there had told him about the underwear they wore, with religious writing on it. According to whoever it was that had told him, they never took it off.

He'd never in his life heard music so unearthly. Perhaps it was the shale of the mountainsides, or the breath of cold fog on the river; whatever the reason, the music, by the time it reached Mickelsson, seemed nothing that human voices could conceivably produce. If stones were to sing, taking their own natural harmonies, or if the restless spirits of dead animals were to cry out, this might be their sound.

Whispering again, Mickelsson asked, “Do you know what they're singing?”

“I'm naht real sher,” the man whispered back. “It don't sownd like country and western.” He laughed. In spite of herself, the woman beyond him laughed too.

That night, when Mickelsson was trying to get to sleep, he found the image in his mind—all those Mormons in the river—depressing. The water was still and red, glowing; in the span of sky between the lighted-up mountaintops and bellies of clouds, birds arced slowly back and forth, shrilly crying. He didn't need Dr. Rifkin to explain why he was gloomy.

He remembered that one night when he was a boy of eight or nine, heavy, dark-haired strangers—hairy all over, males and females—had come to the swimming-hole where he and his cousins often went after chores, a place they'd always thought of as strictly their own, though in fact it had been on railroad property. The strangers were loud, the kind of people his mother called “coarse,” always grabbing each other, splashing water, screaming, throwing pebbles. They had beer with them. Though he himself hadn't seen it, his cousin Erik had whispered into his ear that one of the males had stuck his thing up into one of the females, underwater—she'd helped him, pulling her suit out of the way. From above you'd have thought they were just horsing around, maybe fighting.