Mickelsson's Ghosts (79 page)

His face froze in another wince, dripping tears, partly anger at the brain's endless posturing. Shameless, sentimental bullshit. That was what community was for, to tell the visionary madman “Come off it!” John the Baptist bawling in the wilderness. Cassandra blubbering by the sea.

So the young moved out from their fathers' houses to new places—Utah, Southern France—and put down roots, sucked in air, fell in love with the scent of coalsmoke or sassafras, whatever; and so long as they remained there in the new land Jehovah had set aside for them, all was well with them, they knew who they were, what they were there for. In other words knew nothing; questioned nothing, learned nothing. Such was the program. Flight from the nest, new nest-building, then steadiness, the old heart mellowing into loam to feed the trees of the great-greatgrandchildren's nests. The world had been meaningful by inspection then, because no one but the sad-eyed, lamenting Jews had been constrained to move endlessly from place to place, from home to alienating consciousness; tear up again and again those roots they'd so thirstily put down, forget names and faces betrayed, betraying. … Alas, the fidelity the heart required was no longer among the world's possibilities. Now all people were Jews. How many would survive the new, universal holocaust? Not Mickelsson, he feared—thinking the same instant,
Self-pity!
Weeping. (Clear vision was the hermit's hope. Sentimentality the risk. For hermit, read crowd-pressed modern man.) He thought, in contrast, of his father, dying in the hospital, surrounded by friends, tubes in his arms and nose.

The unfortunate thing about the mentally ill, he thought, imagining he was speaking to Rifkin, is that they're vile.

Rifkin shrugged. “Who's not vile?”

He left the dark, outer houses of Susquehanna behind him—in the windows, the flickering blue light of TV sets, all sweet sorrowing America's opiate, even Susquehanna's, though not his, up on the mountain, where one could only get the sound and where even that, what one could get of it, was blurry, like a confusion of sea-nymph voices in a cave. Just as well that he should be denied even television's comfort. Having abandoned his friends, his wife, even himself, he was one of the world's new beings, not fit to survive, but sufficiently clear-headed to tell the tale. He looked over at the shotgun, the barrel just a shadow now, standing upright, silhouetted against the window, like a narrow hitch-hiker.

He began to drive faster, more recklessly than usual, sliding on icy corners, still wiping his eyes from time to time. Barrelling around a corner not far from where the doctor had nearly hit him all those weeks ago, his headlights lit up—black against the sugar-crystal whiteness of snow—two hatless, long-coated young men climbing a snowbank to get out of his way. They teetered precariously, flailing their arms, much too high on the bank to be in danger, though they apparently didn't know it. Their invasion of his territory made anger flash. Mickelsson rolled down the window and shouted as he shot past,
“Wo kein Kläger ist, wer wird da richten?”
It was a stupid, adolescent thing to do. Crazy. If he were drunk, perhaps … Poor devils! But he was smiling, pleased with himself. He did no harm; they had each other—as poor dying Miss Minton had had the principal, the School Board, the parental conspiracy of silence. They had behind them, these two souls in black, the whole shadowy army of Mormon, a drab, sober-minded community stretching to the ends of the earth, from Susquehanna to darkest Peru. God bless community, never mind what—the Century Club, the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, Mickelsson and his ugly cat. He shook his head and saw his reflection in the windshield shake its head.

When he was inside his house and had closed the door, he stood for a long time with his legs planted in one place like pillars, the shotgun cradled in his arm, his eyes gazing around balefully, trying to think where he should put the gun. He had no mantel—there was only the woodstove—and he was reluctant to put it in some closet, out of sight. From the couch, the sickly, angry gray and white cat watched him carefully. No doubt the old bastard knew about guns. Yet he did not leave.

At last, as a temporary measure, Mickelsson leaned the shotgun against the wall by the door, next to the flowerstand holding Jessie's gloves. Then he went into the kitchen, switched on the light, opened the refrigerator door, and for a long time—he had no idea how long—stood gazing in, cold air pouring over him.

He was roused from his reverie by a whine of trucks passing on the road in front of his house. He ran to the front door and looked out. They were driving without headlights. “Call the police!” he told himself. But he was more afraid of the police than of the trucks. He wiped perspiration from his forehead.

Late that night, in his damp, stone-walled cellar—all the lights upstairs turned out, the cat asleep on the rug near the stove—Mickelsson built a workbench, eight feet long and solid as a rock, with a deep drawer below and cupboards above for stains, glue, and tung oil, and a large space of bare wall for peg-board, which he meant to buy tomorrow. (Slink into town, dart back again …) He made the bench with meticulous care, measuring, levelling, fitting, bevelling. He'd definitely decided now to make things; he wasn't sure what. Boxes, coffins, windowboxes, wheelbarrows … He'd get himself a band-saw, table-saw, drill-press, and belt-sander, possibly a lathe. Thomas would not press for payment. It didn't matter what he made, as long as it was more or less useless, and craftily done. He sawed and hammered, puffing at his pipe, sweating, filling every pore with dust. He pegged and glued every carefully fitted joint and rabbet, and, while the glue dried, tied the whole thing drum-tight with fishline. When he plucked the taut nylon holding the deep pine drawer together, it rang like the string of a guitar. When he finished, swept up, and went upstairs to take a bath, once more soothe his aching muscles, there was watery light above the mountains to the east.

He slept till noon, then immediately, without eating (he stopped to eat less and less, these days), removing the telephone receiver from its hook, went back directly to his project. First he went down cellar to look at the bench—everything was as it should be—then he drove to Susquehanna to order tools. Owen Thomas had in stock a band-saw, slightly used, and a drill-press, new, also a belt-sander, a back-saw and picture-frame clamps. The rest he'd have to send for. By suppertime that night, Mickelsson's new woodshop was whining and growling, spreading clouds of white dust. He imagined his father and uncle looking on, pulling at their chins—imagined them so clearly they were almost there, though they were not.

Neither was Rifkin there, though Mickelsson pretended to talk with him and the daydream was sometimes as vivid as daydreams of childhood.

Rifkin leaned against the workbench, crookedly smiling, his chin bunched up. “So what's it all mean?”

“No meaning,” Mickelsson said, carefully lining a board for the saw-cut, a curve he knew to be a hair too tight for the saw. “I'm entering into mindless ritual. Just me and things.”

“Bullshit.”

“Very well, I'm making Christmas presents. One has one's responsibilities.
Ich soill! Ich soill!
Possibly I'll make something for Ellen and The Comedian.” Forcing the blade just a little, he managed the cut.

“I'll bet.”

“You have no faith, Rifkin. That's your problem.” He lined up the next cut.

“I have faith that if you keep drinking gin in the middle of the afternoon on an empty stomach, you'll lop off your hand with that band-saw.”

“And you don't believe in accidents.”

“Not the intentional kind.”

“Good point. I must be careful with the band-saw.” He drank, then sawed his mark.

With one finger, Rifkin pushed his glasses up his nose. “Why'd you buy the gun?”

“To kill myself, you think?” He made his eyes wide in mock-horror.

“Just asking. I notice you cry a lot.”

“I noticed it myself,” he said with exaggerated interest, tilting his head. “Sometimes I don't even feel anything when I cry, I just happen to touch my face and—slippery! It's vile.”

“You use that word a lot,” Rifkin said with distaste.

“I do.” He was suddenly wary. The imaginary Rifkin should not notice what he hadn't noticed himself. He said, as if covering himself, “I must watch that.”

“Mickelsson, I like you,” Rifkin said, devious and saccharine. The finger with which he pointed was as stiff as the barrel of a pistol. “I'm just trying to help you. Why must you make it so difficult?”

Mickelsson's hands leaped back, thinking on their own. The band-saw was screaming, the blade off its track. He was all right, but his heart was whamming and he was itchy all over, fear-sweat exploding through every pore. He reached down with a shaking left hand to turn the power off. Gradually he calmed himself.

“Doctor,” he began, loosening the thumbnuts that held the plastic shield, preparing to retrack the blade; but the word
doctor
stopped his mind, or redirected it. Looking down at his sawdusty hand, he was thinking of the large, pale woman who'd sold him his house. For an instant he was convinced that she'd sold the house and moved to Florida, where her brother was also a doctor, because she was dying. The whiteness was some terminal disease.

He was stilled, as if her death too, like the fat man's and like Nugent's, were his fault. Tears of self-pity washed down his cheeks.
Christ,
he thought, half praying.

He must make these presents for his children. Pull himself together.

Rifkin was there again. “Doesn't it bother you that you're doing nothing at all for your friend Jessie?” He pushed up his glasses. “I mean, there
is
the real world.”

“Well, Doctor,” Mickelsson whispered, and glanced nervously at the stairs, then took a deep breath, “there are senses in which these other things are real, too.”

To his distress and grief, brightly wrapped presents arrived from both his daughter and son. He was reminded to ship off the presents he'd made them. They would be late.

Christmas Eve came, and then Christmas Day. Surely never in his life had he experienced anything so painful. He lay in bed as if hoping he might somehow sleep through it, but his mind teemed with memories, each one more painful than the last—Leslie and Mark as children, up at the crack of dawn, running into the master bedroom to show what treasures they'd found in their stockings; the dark, pagan service—as it had seemed to Mickelsson—at the cavernous stone church in Heidelberg where not one note of the Christmas music was familiar; Christmases of his childhood, a brightly painted sled his father and Uncle Edgar had made for him once, had built right before his eyes, telling him it was for “a poor child who wouldn't get anything if someone didn't make something for him,” which had made Mickelsson jealous, though he'd hid his feelings bravely, never guessing the child was himself. Oh, cruel holiday! Infinitely more terrible lie than Santa Claus! Day of agonizing human love, awful promise that God would be equally loving and—against all odds, against all reason—would ultimately make everything all right. He got up, simply to be moving, distract his mind from the sound of his own heartbeat, looking out at the world through a wash of tears that gave every stick of furniture, every tree outside, a prism halo. He wanted to call Jessie, Ellen, his children. He would have been grateful even to hear the voice of his successor with Ellen, The Comedian. “Christ!” he moaned, burying his face in his hands; and then, to himself: “Asshole! Get hold of yourself!” Though he knew better, he turned on the radio. Every sound that came over it, even the stupidly pious sermons from the fundamentalist station in Montrose, flooded his heart with love and remorse. Handel's
Messiah
made him sit down on the floor and clench his fists, bang them on the carpet like Achilles in his tent, and sob. Redemption, resurrection … what ghastly, unspeakable lies, if they were lies! He, Peter Mickelsson, was the frozen, buried world, and the deep snow that buried him and would never be melted was his murder of the fat man, that and much, much more: his swinish misuse of Donnie Matthews, his failure to love his wife as she'd deserved, his betrayal of Jessie—sins, failures, death-stink blossoming on every hand! At last the need to cry left him, though not the sorrow. He made himself a lunch of lettuce and baloney sandwiches, and drank a beer.

In the middle of the afternoon, like some kind of joke miracle, the two red-headed, extremely dirty-faced boys from Stearns' Texaco appeared at his back door. He'd called them two days ago to come up and jump-start his Jeep and see what was wrong with it. They'd been too buried in work to come, they said now, but Christmas Day was always light. “You work on Christmas?” he asked. They shook their heads, grinning, looking at the ground. “Man, we're always there!”

Mickelsson put on his coat, gloves, and boots, and went out with them to look at the long-dead iron monster. He couldn't tell whether it was the cold or his pleasure in seeing someone that made tears well up in his eyes again, but the world was once more blurry, edged with light.

They found the battery was shot. They could sell him a new one—a cheap piece of junk, but serviceable, they assured him—for twenty-four dollars. After a moment's reflection—his mind still unfocussed—Mickelsson agreed, and the boys went back to the station and then reappeared a short while later and put in a battery bright as a child's toy, white plastic sides and a yellow plastic cover with red caps. They started up the Jeep and listened for a while, standing there in the dazzling sun- and snow-light—such brightness that Mickelsson had to shade his eyes and squint—the two young men saying nothing, one red-head holding the door open, bending his ear over the steer ingwheel, head turned sideways, as if listening for some infinitely soft whisper of complaint, the other standing by the left front fender, hands in coatpockets, smiling at the hood. Under the disguise of dirt they were remarkably handsome. They had mysteriously twinkling, potentially dangerous light blue Scotch-Irish eyes, the pupils just now mere pinpoints. The boy leaning in to listen called to Mickelsson, “Does it always run this haht?”