Mickelsson's Ghosts by John Gardner (guided reading books .TXT) 📕

“What do you teach up at the cahllege?” Tim asked. He spoke with his head thrown forward and laid over on the side, like a motorcycle rider glancing back.

“Philosophy,” Mickelsson said.

He looked impressed. “Philahsaphy! That’s something I never got into too much. Plato’s cave and like that?”

“Something like that,” Mickelsson said, and gave a nod.

Tim laughed, swung his head, and hit the steeringwheel again. He was looking down into the valley to the left of them now, driving without a glance at the road but driving well. “I took an English course down at Lehigh Cahllege where we read some philahsaphy. It was hard going, but it was interesting. Aristahtle?”

“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,