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

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