Mickelsson's Ghosts (78 page)

While he fixed and ate supper, carelessly, almost reluctantly—the grocery bags still out on the counter; he must remember to put them away in the fridge—he listened to Beethoven symphonies one after another on the stereo, learning nothing, his brain grown numb. His back began to ache, an effect of a muscular tension he hadn't been aware of. He imagined Donnie Matthews, riding on a train somewhere, looking out with frightened eyes.

Close as the stereo was to the kitchen—the speakers were just inside the livingroom door—he felt as if he were listening to something far away, increasingly far away—maybe Donnie's train plummeting into darkness—as if the music were coming from somewhere deep in the interstices of things, perhaps from himself, not that the music became clearer to him now: the cypher remained as inscrutable as ever. He felt himself more and more one with it, and yet, paradoxically, removed from himself, as if he were vanishing. (There was something about that in Ortega y Gasset.) He was in a state almost trancelike; indeed, perhaps he was in a trance, as when one sits in a chair and by self-hypnosis raises one's arm, telling oneself with full conviction that the arm will rise, though one will not consciously raise it. He had a sense that by a head-shake he could pull out of this state, but by the faintest flicker of choice he allowed it to continue. The lines and colors of the kitchen became sharper, cleaner, as if brute existents were springing to life. His thought was dreamy and confused. He could not have explained, if someone had asked him, the distinction between himself and the walls of the room, the sudden swell of horns and violins.

When he went in to change the record at the end of the Sixth Symphony, he saw the old woman standing at the window, looking out, dabbing at her mouth with the pitifully wrinkled, gray hankie. She looked lost, befuddled. He could get no trace of anger from her now.

“Is there something I can do for you?” he asked.

She seemed not to hear.

His heart ticking rapidly, causing a light pain, he moved closer to look at her face. She was not the kind of ghost one could see through. No one, if he had come in and seen her standing there, would have believed she was a ghost, though somehow it was clear that she did not belong here in ordinary reality. Sometimes she whispered something, talking to herself—nothing Mickelsson could make sense of. After the hours of music, he was strongly conscious of the silence. He felt then, suddenly, a physical shock, a blow as if from inside that gave him, instantly, a splitting headache; and now, as if something had prevented it from getting through before, filtering it somehow, he felt the anger. He wouldn't have believed that one could live, not have a stroke, walking around in such a rage.

“Why are you here?” he asked. He pressed the heel of his right hand against the pain in his forehead.

Apparently he did not exist for her. Perhaps nothing existed as solidly as her emotion. He was tempted to reach out and touch her, not with his hand but with the record he held in it, which he'd been preparing to put on the changer—but he couldn't bring himself to do it. At last, abruptly, on rubbery legs, he turned and walked back to the stereo, put the record on, flicked the switch, then walked heavily back—touching the walls, the furniture, the doorway—into the kitchen. It was nearly dark now, late twilight, black clouds moving swiftly across the valley. More snow was predicted. He went into the bathroom to find aspirin. Beethoven wailed and crashed behind him like ice-and-snow mountains falling in, meaningless noise, oddly off rhythm, he thought, hardly more ordered than the vacuum-cleaner noise, until it came to him that part of the sound was not from the record player but from outside, somewhere in the woods above his house: gunshots, three in quick succession, then after a moment a fourth. John Pearson hunting, no doubt. Expressing himself, like Beethoven? What did one hunt—except one's own soul—at twilight, in deeply drifted woods?

He forgot about Tillson's party, or rather chose not to remember it. The roads were clear, a single snow-packed lane between eight-foot-high banks, when, three nights later, he drove the Chevy down to Susquehanna for groceries. Those he'd gotten before had spoiled, left out on the counter. The town's Christmas decorations had been up for weeks now—green, red, yellow, white and blue, reflected in the slush and the steely ice below, and on the dented metal of cars and high-bodied pickups with hydraulic plows. The lights and the tinny Christmas music coming from a second-story loudspeaker (Donnie's window was dark) flooded him with unwelcome sentimental emotion. He had to sit for five minutes in the Jeep, regaining control. At last, conspicuous, as if every window were intently watching him, he walked across the street to the Acme to get what he needed. Everyone was talking about the murders—the fat man was only one. An old woman who lived in a trailer had been killed by her daughter, stabbed seven times, and a taxi driver had been found on Airport Road, north of Binghamton, shot in the head execution-style. Without a word the check-out girl gave Mickelsson his bounced check. It was all right; he'd cashed a check for a hundred dollars just that morning at the bank. Though he'd again weakened and sent money to Ellen, it would probably clear. Donnie's absence was in one way, anyhow, a great burden lifted off. When he'd set the grocery bags on the seat beside him and was about to head back home, he abruptly changed his mind, got out again, slammed the door, and walked up the street toward Owen Thomas's.

A man who looked like a Montana cowboy in winter came toward him with one hand raised, clenched to a fist inside its leather glove—perhaps a warning, perhaps a greeting. Mickelsson stopped in his tracks. The man had a wide hat much like Mickelsson's, a big sheepskin coat, jeans, and heavy black boots. “Hay, Prafessor!” Though it was night, he wore dark glasses.

Yet Mickelsson's heart calmed. The voice was Tim's. “Hello!” Mickelsson said. “Long time no see!”

“Just tryin to keep owt of the way of killers,” Tim said and laughed, gently slapping Mickelsson's shoulder.

“That's something, isn't it?” Mickelsson said, and felt his expression twist strangely. He remembered someone's saying that Tim was homosexual. It seemed utterly improbable, but what could anyone know about anything? He thought of the motorcyclists Tim rode with and had a brief nightmare vision of the whole pack of them as killer homosexuals. He stopped himself in disgust. “It's scary, the way the world's going.” He covered his mouth with his hand.

“Isn't that the dahrn truth!” Tim said, and laughed. “That's something, though, that fat man. Sitting up there all this time with all that stash, useless to him as a waterproof ear on a prairie dog!”

“Ah?” Mickelsson said. The part about the fat man's loot had not been in the paper.

“That's what the murderers were after all right,” Tim said, happily grinning.

Murderers.
Mickelsson's heart jumped. “They took something, then, you think?”

“I guess the cops don't know that, yet. Leave it to Tacky Tinklepaugh, they'll never know. But I guess they gaht the Sheriff's Department in on it now, and there's a chance it'll go right to the F.B.I. Possible the man robbed a bank, while back.”

“I suppose they don't know who killed him—who the murderers were?”

“Naht yet,” Tim said. “Course everybody
really
knows. But what can you do?” Tim's smile drew back on one side, ironic.

He wondered if his eyes, staring into Tim's, showed his fright. He still had no control of his mouth, and kept it covered.

Before he could think what to say, Tim slapped his shoulder again, about to step past him, and said cheerily, “Hay, gotta run, Prafessor. See ya!” And he was gone. Mickelsson half turned to look after him. He hadn't quite realized how big Tim was, until this moment. Had he meant, by “murderers,” Mickelsson and Donnie? Had she talked to him, perhaps? Suddenly it seemed to Mickelsson that of
course
everyone must know who had killed the fat man. He remembered how he'd shouted, that night in Donnie's apartment; the whole town must have heard it. Lowering his head, chewing his upper lip, he continued on his way to the hardware store.

The bell rang cheerily as he opened the front door, and Owen Thomas looked up from the cash-register and smiled, distant. “Merry Christmas,” he said. Mickelsson nodded and, as soon as possible, feigning interest in this and that, got his back turned to the man.

The store was full of light, as always—a good deal more light than usual: electric wreaths, painted-glass Santa Clauses, tree lights, blinking electric candles. Along with the usual tools, plastic trashcans, plumbing and electrical materials, and the rest, the aisles were now crowded with sleds, trikes, games, plastic dolls, stuffed animals, and, on the shelves along the sides, small appliances to tempt farm wives. Walter Cronkite was talking on the display TV. The sound was turned off.

“I hear you've done wonders up there,” Owen said.

“Who told you that?” Mickelsson asked with what he knew must sound like guilty sharpness. He smiled too late.

“Oh, you know”—Thomas grinned, more on one side than on the other, the center of his mouth drawing sideways—”people who make deliveries, maybe Wilcox, the man who fixes furnaces. … Nothing's secret, little town like this.”

Mickelsson hastily turned away for fear that the blood was draining from his face too visibly. “Well, I keep busy,” he said. His eye fell on the gunrack—rifles, shotguns, pistols, the metal wonderfully solid, all business, the wooden stocks gleaming with soft, reflected light, red, yellow, green, blue.

“Thinking of doing some hunting?” Owen asked.

“They sure are beautiful things, aren't they?” Mickelsson said. “I wonder whether it's guilt or pride that makes people put all that devotion into making a gun?”

The storekeeper thought about it.

Mickelsson pointed to the lock on the case. “You got a key to that?”

“I better,” Owen said, and smiled.

He drove back slowly, still surprised at himself, thinking what fear disguised as indignation his ex-wife would feel if he were to walk into the house and hold out to her his purchase, challenge all her twisted, secret violence with the weapon's stern wood and steel. But she wouldn't be there, of course. Never again. For a moment, as when he'd first walked out, the realization that their parting was final gave Mickelsson a sharp pang, made the buildings on each side of the street high and dark. He thought of her parents, of whom he'd been fond—gentle, shy people, proud of their brilliant daughter, though troubled by her ways. “Shoot,” her father would say, smiling and blushing; it was all he could think of, whichever way the conversation turned. He owned a dry-goods store and wore a flag in his lapel. He and Ellen's mother had married when they were eighteen and had lived happily ever after, good Methodists. He'd been the captain of a bowling team. Mickelsson had gone with Ellen to watch him once and had been startled at the sight of him not dressed in a suit, wearing the peculiar purple jacket with gold lettering—he couldn't now remember the name of the team. When Ellen's father barbecued steaks, always well done, he wore an apron that said
COME AND GET IT!
The thought of Ellen's parents made the grief worse than it might otherwise have been. Surely Ellen had been in some ways like them, salt of the earth, though at first glance there seemed no possible connection between Ellen and those two shy people. According to something in a letter Mickelsson had gotten from his daughter months ago, Ellen and her parents were no longer on good terms. He wished he could see them again, or write to them, at least.

But the wave of unhappiness passed more quickly than it would have done six months ago. One could outlive anything, he was beginning to see. What one would once have called unspeakable—he was thinking of the murder—could become just a private unpleasantness, like an ugly argument in the corner of a crowded, noisily cheerful room.

He drove home past Christmas-lighted windows, the huge gloomy-towered old Catholic church with its doors and windows all aglow, full of people no doubt, then darker streets, the tall, bare trees around the hospital. In all this time he hadn't spoken a word to Tom Garret. The thought made him draw in his head in the darkness of the car.

He hunched his shoulders and drew his head in more. He must do something to put order back into his life. With a start he remembered that he must think of something to buy his children for Christmas. How many days had he left? He frowned, blinking sudden tears back, leaning toward the windshield, and gradually realized that it was useless to try to work out what the date might be, he couldn't concentrate. His hands pressed into the steeringwheel. Monday. Some Monday before Christmas. He clamped his lips together and tasted salt. Angrily, with his thumb and one finger, his hand spread wide, he wiped his eyes. His daughter and son would be at home with their mother in Providence for Christmas, he brooded, momentarily forgetting that his son had disappeared. He saw dark hallways, leaded windows, candlelight reflected on old, cracked paintings. Providence was a social place, and no one more sociable than Ellen and the children. He imagined them laughing and singing, arms around the shoulders of their friends, their mother—rolling down the car windows, calling out to strangers, students skulking across lawns: “Merry Christmas!” He imagined the dead fat man stumbling toward them calling out for help. “Mercy!” he would moan, blackness in his mouth. Mickelsson shook his head, driving the crazy image back to darkness.

He remembered that Mark would not be there, would be God knew where.

He bent still farther toward the windshield, discomfort in his chest. He could see his partly bared teeth in the windshield, his glistening eyes. Wince of a killer. Poor super-ape, programmed to love and forget! Whole generations came and went on the earth, and—because, once they'd settled in, made a place for themselves, they never left home, never wandered lost from the valleys they'd chosen or inherited from their fathers—they, those former, safe generations, had never learned the truth: that all this mighty turmoil of the heart is illusion: love of kin, the home dirt, the hymns of one's particular sect. … Once, Peter Mickelsson's heart had leaped at sight of the dusty wheat-yellow hills of California, just as years before that it had leaped at the fairyland green or, in winter, the shadow-dappled white of Wisconsin. But he'd moved one or two (three, four) times too often, and now when his business took him to places where his heart had once leaped—if you could call this nonsense he lived by a business—he was in and out like the Fuller Brush man, Wham bam thank you ma'am, indifferent as he'd be to Daytona Beach or Hackensack. Interesting that the meaning of life, genetically implanted, should be so dispiritingly simple, a certain slope of land, a particular sunlight, the sixth physical sense, the sense of belonging. Even he, for all his travels, was not fully immune—no one was, of course—feeling his idiot heart warm, after only these few months, as his car nosed into the fold of the mountains and, winding up the steep, dark Susquehanna Valley, warm more as he climbed the still flank of his own pile of earth. Yet he could leave, he knew; never bat an eye. He could forget all these people, just like that, become fond again of strangers and leave them too. O Love, let us be true to one another until Tuesday!